Senior judges at the U.S. Supreme Court will on January 10, 2025 discuss Nigeria’s legal battle with Zhongshan Fucheng Ltd. The court will examine Nigeria’s petition for a writ of certiorari, seeking to overturn lower court rulings and avoid paying $70 million damages to Chinese investors. 

Having lost at lower courts which dismissed Nigeria’s immunity arguments as too weak to stand against the strong accusations of breach of contract presented by the Zhongshan investors, Nigeria sought the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court to look into the matter.

Zhongshan investors claimed they spent weeks in detention after the then Ogun State governor, Ibikunle Amosun, crudely backed out of a free trade zone deal and deployed security officers to arrest and keep them in jail 

The foreign investors were out for revenge and pursued the matter in a UK court where $70 million was awarded against the Nigerian government.

It was the judgement that the Chinese investors took to the U.S. for enforcement, specifically to withdraw the tens of millions of dollars from Nigeria’s crude earnings account in JP Morgan.

In a bid to extricate itself from paying the funds, Nigeria under President Bola Tinubu filed a writ of certiorari, to ask the Supreme Court judges to review their arguments.

The U.S. Supreme Court said the case had been distributed to justices ahead of a conference on the matter on January 10, days after Chinese investors waived their right to inrespond to Nigeria’s certiorari petition.

The top court is Nigeria’s last resort to resolve the matter with the Supreme Court’s decision likely to bring an end to the protracted dispute and debates surrounding the seizure of Nigeria’s international assets.

Mr Amosun, who landed Nigeria in the mess, has been mostly quiet since he released a statement in August admitting he mistakenly signed away the multi-billion naira Ogun trade zone agreement without thoroughly reviewing its terms. He claimed that he was deceived by the Chinese investors from Zhongshan Fucheng.