September 24th, 2026
The P&ID case shows that an award obtained on a false account is not a safe harbour, but an open door. Enforcing it invites the scrutiny that arbitration was meant to avoid, and in time the truth tends to follow.
“The difficulty with a fraud that succeeds is that success is rarely the end of the matter. An award must eventually be taken somewhere, and the place to which it is taken is not private.”
I had lunch not long ago with an old friend who worked on the P&ID case. We had not intended to talk about it, but it arrived, as these things tend to, somewhere between the ordering and the arrival of the food, and stayed.
What struck me was not triumph in the telling, of which there was surprisingly little, but fascination with the outcome and the precedent it set.
The award as Trojan horse
I have elsewhere described false evidence in arbitration as a Trojan horse: a party that introduces an untrue account into its own case brings inside its walls the very material by which that case may later be dismantled. P&ID suggests a larger version of the same figure, in which the horse is not the evidence but the award itself.
An award is the object of the whole exercise, sought, celebrated and, where the sums are large enough, treated as a species of property. It is also, and this is what the party wheeling it through the gate tends to overlook, a document that carries within it everything arbitration was chosen to avoid: compulsory disclosure, cross-examination in open court, a public judgment, and the attention of regulators, investigators and the press. A confidential process produces, at its conclusion, the one instrument capable of ending the confidentiality and exposing any false account on which the victory rests.
An award is worth what it can be turned into, and that requires a state court, whether to enforce where the assets lie or to resist a challenge at the seat. From that moment a public institution has been asked to lend its coercive power, and it does not lend that power blindly. Confidentiality has never pretended otherwise: the duty English law implies into an agreement to arbitrate yields to disclosure reasonably necessary to protect a party’s legal rights (Emmott v Michael Wilson & Partners Ltd [2008] EWCA Civ 184), and institutional rules, Article 30.1 of the LCIA Rules 2020 among them, expressly preserve disclosure in order to enforce or challenge an award. Confidentiality governs the conduct of the reference; it was never drafted as a permanent shield.
What winning set in motion
Consider what P&ID’s pursuit of its award against the Federal Republic of Nigeria eventually produced: a challenge in the Commercial Court on the ground that the awards had been procured by fraud; disclosure orders, here and abroad, which brought forward documents the tribunal had never seen; an eight-week trial at which witnesses were cross-examined on oath against their earlier statements; a public judgment reported around the world within hours; and, in consequence, the attention of criminal authorities and of two professional regulators. Little, if any, of that would have come to light had the claim been quietly abandoned. The instrument of victory was also, unavoidably, the instrument of examination.
Robin Knowles J was clear about what made the difference (Federal Republic of Nigeria v P&ID [2023] EWHC 2638 (Comm), at [15]–[16]). The truth emerged through disclosure ordered from P&ID and third parties; without it the outcome would very likely have been different. Disclosure was, in his analysis, fundamental to a fair trial and a just outcome, and the corollary is plain enough: facts cannot be justly determined on evidence that one side has been permitted to keep to itself.
What the tribunal could not see
None of this is a criticism of the tribunal, which was distinguished and which decided, on the material before it, the case it was given. The difficulty is structural. A tribunal can test only what it is shown, its powers over third parties are limited, and it has no way of knowing that a party before it is represented badly, or corruptly, or in no meaningful sense at all. Where the decisive material lies with the party that has every interest in suppressing it, fairness depends less on the skill of the questions than on whether anything exists capable of compelling an answer.
The judge also addressed resources. Parties frequently arrive at major disputes with grossly unequal means; that inequality, he observed, reinforces rather than dilutes the need for the highest professional standards, and there may be a role for major firms in supporting parties with limited resources. Nigeria eventually found the money and the will to look. Many parties never do.
The lawyers inside the horse
Among the things the award carried through the gate were findings about two English lawyers, P&ID’s solicitor and a barrister instructed on its behalf. The judge found that they appreciated that Nigeria’s internal legal documents, at least some of them privileged, had come into P&ID’s hands; that they knew P&ID was not entitled to them; and that their decision not to put a stop to it, at the least by informing Nigeria or returning the documents, was indefensible. Each stood to receive, contingent on success, what were described in argument as life-changing sums, and the judge referred his judgment to the Bar Standards Board and to the Solicitors Regulation Authority as well. Both have denied any wrongdoing.
Twenty-eight days
Section 70(3) of the Arbitration Act 1996 requires a challenge to be brought within twenty- eight days of the award, and the Arbitration Act 2025, while clarifying when time begins, left the period untouched. For the ordinary disappointed party that is workable, and deliberately so, since finality is what English-seated arbitration sells. The real question is whether a period measured from the award is coherent at all where the ground of challenge is fraud.
Fraud is often not discoverable within twenty-eight days. The party that obtained the award by concealment has every incentive to maintain it, and the evidence usually sits with that
party or those it has paid. In P&ID the decisive documents emerged years later, and the challenge proceeded only because the court extended time in 2020 under section 80(5) and CPR 62.9. Knowles J described section 68 as a narrow but essential safeguard, through which justice may outweigh finality in exceptional cases.
Conclusion
It is possible to read P&ID as reassurance: the court intervened, the award was set aside, the fraud was named. What that reading omits is that none of it was designed. The fraud was caught not by the arbitration, nor by the tribunal, nor by the professional obligations of those involved, but by a defendant that eventually found the means to look, and by courts willing to order disclosure of what the tribunal had never seen.
For the party contemplating an ambitious case built on a doubtful account, the lesson is practical rather than moral. The award is not the end of the story but the beginning of another, told in a forum of the opponent’s choosing, and there is a grim symmetry in the fact that the party which insists most vigorously on its victory is the one most likely to see it examined. False testimony may carry a party through a hearing, and occasionally through to an award; it is far less suited to the longer and more public journey that every award must afterwards make, and it is on that journey that the truth has a habit of reasserting itself.
