How two Irish businessmen almost cheated Nigeria out of $11 billion

The next step was to prepare a proposal for the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the department that oversees Nigeria's significant reserves of fossil fuels. P.&I.D. would build the $500 million facility. Nigeria would supply wet gas for the company free of charge. Then P.&I.D. would process it and transport the poor gas to the country free of charge. But in return, the company would keep the valuable byproducts of the gas extraction process, such as propane and butane, which it could sell at a profit. If Nigeria withdraws at any time before the full term of the 20-year contract, the country could be held liable for damages. Overall, it seemed like a huge liability for Nigeria, one that might be met with skepticism if the ministry's lawyers eventually looked at it.

Around this time, a lawyer named Grace Taiga got a new job at the ministry, as legal director. This was fortunate, because Quinn and Cahill had known Taiga for years, ever since she worked at the Department of Defense, and they were businessmen who occasionally won contracts from them. Approximately one year prior to the submission of P.&I.D's proposal. Quinn and Cahill sent Taiga and one of her daughters just over $25,000 in additional payments. Quinn also took Taiga's colleague, a Ministry employee named Taofiq Tijani, to dinner at Chopsticks, a Chinese restaurant in Abuja. The cost of that dinner was recorded in the books at $2,800. (A Chinese dinner doesn't cost $2,800 in Abuja.) Shortly before the contract was signed, Cahill sent another $5,000 from a bank in Cyprus to Taiga's daughter's account, which was coded as a “commission payment.”

Taiga sent the contract to her boss, Rilwanu Lukman, the minister of petroleum resources. It wasn't much: twenty pages of mostly boilerplate language, drawn up on green-bordered ministry letterhead. It was more of an outline than a fully developed proposal for a multimillion-dollar gas deal. But Taiga assured Lukman in a memo that it would be “a leap forward” for Nigeria. On January 11, 2010, Lukman, Quinn and Taiga signed their signature. The deal was done.

Days later, a man named Neil Hitchcock – the only full-time employee of P.&I.D. – to Cahill, saying he needed $1.5 million to start clearing the land for the facility. But P.&I.D. didn't have $1.5 million. The plan was to raise capital for the project based on the signed twenty-year contract and then bring in engineers and workers. That's how they had always worked in Nigeria.

In June, Quinn opened his morning paper with an unwanted twist. The oil drilling company that Nigeria had promised to supply the wet gas had decided to keep; the gas proved useful in maintaining pressure in the wells. Quinn might have picked up the phone and protested to his friends in the government, but most of them were gone. A new president had recently taken office. Lukman had been replaced. In February 2011, Hitchcock sent a text message suggesting the company was in trouble. “Given the rapidly deteriorating situation here, I see no other option than to liquidate a number of P.&I.D. companies. assets,” he wrote. “With your approval, I propose to sell the Honda Civic.” Quinn emailed the new president, Goodluck Jonathan, but his call yielded no results.