Mitigating Legal Risks in Nigeria's Project Finance Market

Project finance is a subset of financial techniques used traditionally in raising long-term debt financing for projects particularly in the energy and mining sectors of the economy. However, over the years, it has proved helpful in raising the required funds to drive public infrastructure projects through the public private partnership framework. By its nature, project finance is either non-recourse, or of limited recourse, to the project sponsors and hence identifying the various risks and determining who should bear these risks is the overarching essence of project finance technique. These uncertainty and risks may have significant impact on outturn costs or benefits of a particular infrastructure project. Generally, typical project finance transaction is fraught with many project risks which sometimes overlap. However, among these inherent risks there are some that are legal in nature and hence they are referred to as legal risks. So, this article seeks to interrogate the related legal risks in project finance as a financing technique to fund development of infrastructure and in particular, the procurement of critical public infrastructure assets in Nigeria and the various ways by which these risks can be mitigated to drive infrastructure development in the country.