Out-of-court negotiations between the drugmaker and the Kano State government broke down after the government and representatives of victims’ families turned down an offer of $10 million compensation, The Daily Trust reports.

The head of the Kano victims’ association, Alhaji Mustapha Maisikeli, said a series of meetings were held in Abuja, London and in Dubai last week, but the victims turned down an offer of $10,000 to each victim with minor deformities and $100,000 to each victim with major deformities or death arising from the Trovan drug test of 1996. The state government also rejected the offer.

Maisikeli called the offer demeaning and outrageous. “We want to announce that talks between us have failed after they discriminatorily offered to give us $10 million, the same amount offered since the beginning of this year. This is at a time they equally offered to give the counsel $21 million dollars for the cost of litigations,” he tells the Trust.

The chairman described Pfizer Nigeria’s lawyers as clogs preventing the reaching of an acceptable settlement between Pfizer and the victims. “It is unfortunate that it is Nigerian lawyers that are blocking any tangible agreement after they agreed to collect $21 million from Pfizer as litigation fees, while insisting that we must collect $10 million as compensation,” he continues.

Nigeria’s federal government and its northern state of Kano sued Pfizer last year for a total $8.5 billion in damages over Trovan tests during a 1996 meningitis epidemic that killed 12,000 children. The civil and criminal cases have grown into a tangle of unresolved petitions and counter-claims, dragging from one adjournment to the next, and have included threats to bring current and former Pfizer execs, including former ceo Bill Steere, to Nigeria to testify. Pfizer has denied the charges.

However, a Pfizer lawyer, who was also accused by the victims of sabotaging the ongoing out of court settlement, Chief Anthony Adighe (SAN), insisted that discussions were on to reach an acceptable settlement between Pfizer and the victims, the paper writes.

He had earlier asked the High Court One presided over by acting Chief Judge of Kano State, Justice Shehu Atiku to adjourn the case in view of the upcoming legal year and the fact that the court would soon go for vacation. The court then adjourned the criminal case to 7th of October while the civil case was also adjourned to 6th of October.