The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has faulted the investigation by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) into the controversial Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), accusing the anti-graft agency of shielding government officials.
The opposition party said the ICPC’s interim report failed to answer key questions surrounding the activities of PFIPC and appeared more focused on exonerating government officials than uncovering the full extent of the controversy.
The ADC’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, disclosed this in a statement issued on Saturday.
The party said the controversy went beyond Adeniyi Adeyemi, the PFIPC Director-General, whose prosecution was recommended by the ICPC.
The ICPC had on Thursday recommended Adeyemi for prosecution after concluding that PFIPC had no legal backing and never existed as a government agency.
The commission also cleared the Presidency and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) of wrongdoing, while attributing the emergence and operation of the purported agency to institutional lapses across various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
Reacting to the report, the ADC described it as predictable and “inadequate, saying it raised more questions than it answered.
The party questioned how an agency the ICPC described as fictitious was able to secure office space within the Federal Secretariat, have civil servants deployed to it, receive official vehicles with customised number plates and appear in the 2026 budget with a N1.3 billion allocation.
“It would be recalled that when President Bola Tinubu directed the ICPC to undertake investigation into this case, ADC had waved it off, insisting instead on a full investigation by an independent panel,” the statement said.
“With the so-called interim report of the ICPC, our fears have come to pass as the report is not only predictable, it appears more concerned with exonerating government officials rather than providing clear answers to the serious questions that the scandal has raised.”
The ADC also rejected the ICPC’s characterisation of the controversy as a result of procedural failures within government institutions.
“The ICPC report appeared to have given the impression that what happened was mere failure in government processes or procedures,” the party said.
“This position is difficult to sustain in the light of publicly available evidence, which establishes that this is not an error of omission or a mere glitch in the system.
“Instead, what happened was a grand scam that could have been possible only with the active connivance of government officials and institutions at the highest level.”
The opposition party questioned why the ICPC recommended only Adeyemi for prosecution while acknowledging that its investigation was still ongoing and that other individuals could be implicated.
“If all that the commission had to present was a preliminary report, why not simply present it as confidential brief to the president instead of making a public drama of it in a manner that potentially prejudiced the overall investigation and cast Adeyemi as the principal culprit?” the ADC asked.
The party said the ICPC should have focused on how the fictitious agency obtained the approvals, personnel and institutional support required to operate within government.
“What Nigerians expected was an investigation into how a ‘fictitious agency’ managed to obtain all authorisations and institutional support required to operate as a legitimate government agency,” the ADC said.
The party further asked whether Adeyemi alone could have secured office space within the Federal Secretariat, deployed civil servants, obtained official vehicles, secured armed security and received a reported N1.3 billion allocation in the 2026 Appropriation Act.
The ADC argued that such developments could not have occurred without the involvement or negligence of other government officials and institutions.
The party also said the discovery of two additional fictitious organisations linked to Adeyemi should have prompted the ICPC to expand the scope of its investigation.
“If an investigation into one fake government agency leads investigators to two more, then the obvious question is no longer merely how one individual perpetrated an elaborate fraud,” the ADC said.
“The question is how has this administration operated that made such systemic criminality possible?”
The opposition party also demanded an explanation for how PFIPC found its way into the 2026 federal budget despite the Presidency’s position that the council never existed as a government agency.
“Budgetary provisions do not materialise by accident. They leave records, submissions, approvals and an audit trail,” the party said.