by The next step was to put together a proposal for the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the department that oversees Nigeria’s considerable fossil fuel reserves. P.&I.D. would build the $500 million facility. Nigeria would introduce wet gas at no cost to the company. Then P.&I.D. would process it and channel the poor gas at no cost to the country. But in exchange, the company would keep valuable byproducts of the lean gas process, such as propane and butane, which it could sell at a profit. If Nigeria backed out at any time before the end of the 20-year term of the contract, it could be held liable for damages. Taken together, it seemed like a huge undertaking for Nigeria, one that might be met with skepticism when it was finally seen by the ministry’s lawyers.
Around that 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, since she was in the Ministry of Defense, and they were businessmen who occasionally won contracts with him. For approximately a year prior to the submission of the P. & I.D. proposal, Quinn and Cahill sent Taiga and one of her daughters just over $25,000 in incremental 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 accounting books as $2,800. (A Chinese dinner doesn’t cost $2,800 in Abuja). Then, 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 his boss, Rilwanu Lukman, Minister of Petroleum Resources. It wasn’t much: 20 pages of mostly repetitive language, written on green-bordered ministry letterhead. It seemed more like a sketch than a fully developed proposal for a multibillion-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 names. The deal was done.
Days later, a man named Neil Hitchcock, P.&I.D.’s only full-time employee, wrote to Cahill saying he needed $1.5 million to begin clearing land for the facility. But P.&I.D. He didn’t have 1.5 million dollars. The plan was to raise capital for the project based on the signed 20-year contract and then hire engineers and workers. This is how they had always acted in Nigeria.
In June, Quinn opened his morning paper to find an unwanted twist. The oil drilling company that Nigeria had promised to supply the wet gas had decided to keep it; The gas was useful in maintaining pressure inside the wells. Quinn could have picked up the phone and complained 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 dire straits. “In view of the rapidly deteriorating situation here, I see no other option than to liquidate part of P.&I.D. assets,” he wrote. “With your approval, I propose to sell the Honda Civic.” Quinn emailed the new president, Goodluck Jonathan, but his appeal went nowhere.
