Nigeria’s phantom agency scandal: The paper trail the presidency can’t explain away

Official government documents obtained by Saturday PUNCH show that Nigeria’s Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation formally processed correspondence from the supposedly “fictitious” Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council months before the Presidency publicly denied its existence.

THE PAPER TRAIL THAT WON’T GO AWAY

The Nigerian Presidency has been emphatic: the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council never existed. It was fictitious. A fraud. A con artist’s invention.

There’s just one problem — the government’s own documents tell a very different story.

Saturday PUNCH has exclusively obtained official correspondence showing that the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation didn’t just receive letters from the supposedly non-existent agency — it formally processed them, stamped them and acted on them.

Specifically, the SGF’s office forwarded a request by the council’s self-styled Director-General, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi, seeking office accommodation from recovered Federal Government properties through the EFCC. The forwarding letter was dated November 21, 2024, and signed by the Permanent Secretary, General Services Office, Nnamdi Maurice Mbaeri, on behalf of the SGF.

Registry stamps confirm the letter was received by the SGF’s office on November 12 before being forwarded to the anti-graft agency nine days later.

Let that sink in. The same agency the Presidency now calls “fictitious” had its official correspondence formally processed, referenced and forwarded by a senior government office — with stamps, signatures and reference numbers to prove it.

According to Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga, the PFIPC was a fraud from start to finish. The Presidency has outlined the criminal case against Adeyemi — the forged presidential appointment letters, the 34 bank accounts, the meetings with diplomats at Abuja hotels — all under the banner of an agency they say never had government backing.

Senior Special Assistant Temitope Ajayi went further, calling Adeyemi “an irredeemable con artist” and insisting that internal collaborators within government institutions enabled the scheme. He pledged that those collaborators would be identified and prosecuted.

But here’s the tension: if the agency was entirely fictitious, why did the SGF’s office process its correspondence without raising any alarm? Why did it take officials from the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — not the SGF, not the Presidency — to eventually raise red flags?

Human rights lawyer Femi Falana has called on ICPC to conduct an independent investigation into both Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila and Adeyemi, demanding explanations over an alleged N24 billion budget allocation for the agency and how it reportedly managed to open an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Opposition parties — the ADC and NDC — have demanded Gbajabiamila’s immediate removal, with the ADC asking pointedly: how did an organisation with no legal existence allegedly secure recruitment approvals, appear in government budget documents, correspond with public institutions, engage foreign diplomats and interact with multiple government agencies?

A coalition of civil society organisations has gone further, giving the Presidency a seven-day ultimatum to commence an independent probe — or face a peaceful protest at the Presidential Villa.

Meanwhile, a PUNCH correspondent who visited the Federal Secretariat in Abuja found no trace of any PFIPC office, no signpost, no indication the agency ever operated there. A website once active on a Federal Government domain — pfipc.gov.ng — was last active in April 2025 and is no longer accessible.

Adeyemi was arrested on October 27, 2025. He faces charges of conspiracy, forgery and impersonation before a Federal High Court in Abuja. Gbajabiamila and ten others have been listed as prosecution witnesses.

The EFCC and the SGF’s office had not responded to requests for comment as of the time of filing.