By an Investigative Correspondent
At first glance, the saga of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) reads like a classic, albeit audacious, Nigerian confidence trick. A man named Adeyemi passes himself off as a Director-General, prints high-quality letterheads, hosts foreign diplomats, visits law enforcement chiefs, and gets himself arrested when the house of cards collapses.
But a deep dive by the Observers Times into Nigeria’s budget documents from 2019 to the present reveals a far more disturbing reality.
This is not the story of a lone con artist working out of a suitcase with a forged appointment letter. The evidence points to a highly sophisticated, inside-the-system operation that successfully weaponized institutional memory, manipulated the federal budget architecture, and bypassed the security protocols of multiple state agencies.
Remarkably, months after the principal suspect was arrested and charged, the “phantom” agency he claimed to run was allocated N1,302,978,784 in the signed 2026 Appropriation Act.
Here is the untold story of the PFIPC scandal—and the trail of institutional failures that those in authority are keeping silent about.
The Art of the Dormant Name
To understand how this operation succeeded, one must look back to September 2019.
When President Muhammadu Buhari dissolved the Economic Management Team headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, he replaced it with the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC). Led by Prof. Doyin Salami and featuring renowned economists like Charles Soludo and Bismarck Rewane, the PEAC was a highly visible, legally recognized advisory body.
The Observers Times recalls that when President Bola Tinubu assumed office, he chose to chart a different economic advisory path. In March 2024, he established the Presidential Economic Coordination Council (PECC)—a completely different body chaired by himself, featuring captains of industry like Aliko Dangote and Tony Elumelu, and carrying its own unique budget code.
However, the Buhari-era PEAC was never formally dissolved by gazette or Budget Office circular. It simply went dormant. In the Nigerian bureaucracy, “dormant” does not mean “deleted.”
Whoever designed the PFIPC operation understood this distinction perfectly. They did not invent a name out of thin air. Instead, they resurrected the dormant “Presidential Economic Advisory Council” and grafted a new, fictitious entity onto it: the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC).
To a routine budget reviewer, the hybrid name looked familiar, legitimate, and safe. It was the perfect administrative camouflage.
The N1.3 Billion Paper Trail
The timeline of the budget documents exposes the most damning aspect of this operation.
First, a search of the 2024 and 2025 Appropriation Acts by OBSERVERS TIMES yields no trace of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council, nor does the budget code 0111062001 appear.
Second, this specific code was created fresh and inserted into the executive budget proposal during the September to December 2025 budget preparation window.
On April 17, 2026, President Tinubu signed the 2026 Appropriation Act. On pages 50 and 51, budget code 0111062001 appears, officially designated as: “Presidential Economic Advisory Council / Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council.”
The total allocation for this code stands at N1,302,978,784. This is broken down into N802,978,783 for personnel costs (which includes N573 million in salaries), N200,000,001 for overhead costs, and N300,000,000 for capital expenditure.
This was not a generic placeholder. The capital allocation of N300 million was broken down into ten highly specific line items, including:
N182.5 million for logistics for a “World Investment Summit 2026.”
Funding for a Harvard Program on Negotiation.
A Certified Investment Management Analyst course.
A World Trade Organization trade negotiations course.
This level of detail requires deep institutional knowledge. It was prepared using correct budget nomenclature, likely by an insider intimately familiar with how the Budget Office of the Federation operates.
Most critically, the principal suspect, Adeyemi, was arrested in October 2025 and charged in November 2025. Yet, the budget containing his fake agency was presented to the National Assembly in December 2025 and signed into law in April 2026.
If the presidency knew the agency was fake in October 2025, how did its N1.3 billion funding line survive every stage of executive and legislative budget scrutiny to become law in April 2026?
The Complicit Bureaucracy
For a phantom agency to function, it needs staff, offices, and official communications. The PFIPC obtained all three with alarming ease.
Court documents obtained by Premium Times reveal that in April 2025, Adeyemi wrote to the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (OAGF) requesting staff deployments. He also requested the transfer of two named officers from the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser to the President.
The OAGF complied. On August 28, 2025, three senior civil servants were officially posted to the PFIPC:
Ojo Victor (55), Assistant Chief Accountant.
Omeh Amarachukwu (40), Internal Auditor.
Wakili Saidu (45), Audit Department.
Their official posting letter was published on the OAGF’s public website. When they reported to work on September 8, 2025, they were shown to a shared open office, but were given no tasks, no mandates, and no documentation.
In his statement to the police, Ojo Victor noted: “I have not been documented, and no schedule has been given to me since my assumption, which I find very strange.”
Omeh Amarachukwu admitted: “I only go to work once a week, the reason being that we have nothing to do since we were posted there.”
This exposes a massive failure in public administration. How did the OAGF deploy senior civil servants to an agency that did not legally exist, without verification from the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation?
The High-Level Charade and Timeline
Adeyemi did not hide in the shadows. He used his state-sanctioned legitimacy to conduct high-profile engagements that were covered by mainstream media and state organs:
In May 2025, Adeyemi led a PFIPC delegation to meet the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, at the National Assembly. The meeting was reported by the Voice of Nigeria, Vanguard, and Punch as an official state visit.
In June 2025, he hosted a Chinese business delegation, announcing a bilateral investment platform. OBSERVERS TIMES
In September 2025, he visited the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Ola Olukoyede, to discuss institutional collaboration. A joint press release was issued.
On October 10, 2025, he hosted foreign ambassadors at the Wells Carlton Hotel in Asokoro, completely bypassing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Throughout this period, the agency operated with an official gov.ng email and web domain—a digital credential that can only be issued by the National Information Technology Development Agency upon receipt of strict statutory approvals.
The chronological sequence of these events paints a troubling picture:
In September 2019, the Buhari administration created the PEAC. The body later went dormant but remained active in the system.
By April 2025, Adeyemi was writing to the OAGF requesting staff deployments on official PFIPC letterhead.
Following his high-profile meetings with the Deputy Speaker in May 2025, the OAGF officially posted three civil servants to the PFIPC on August 28, 2025, publishing the letter online.
In September 2025, OBSERVES TIMES Adeyemi visited the EFCC Chairman. By October 10, 2025, he was hosting foreign ambassadors in Abuja.
The operations began to unravel when the Chief of Staff to the President petitioned security agencies on October 17, 2025.
Five days later, on October 22, 2025, a key witness named Dolapo Tanimola reportedly died in an unpublicized fire.
Adeyemi was arrested on October 27, 2025. Despite the arrest, when the 2026 Budget was presented to the National Assembly on December 19, 2025, budget code 0111062001 remained inside it.
On April 17, 2026, President Tinubu signed the budget, legalizing the N1.3 billion allocation.
The Dead Witness and the Unanswered Questions
As the security agencies closed in, the story took a dark and mysterious turn.
According to the presidency’s own statements, Adeyemi claimed his appointment letter was procured with the help of a man named Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola.
On October 22, 2025—just five days before Adeyemi’s arrest—Tanimola reportedly died in a fire at the Kachi Hotel in Utako, Abuja. Strangely, there is no independent police report, media coverage, or fire service record of this fatal hotel fire. It exists only within the text of the presidency’s official statement.
As Adeyemi’s trial approaches on July 27, the prosecution must address issues that go far beyond the actions of one suspect:
First, who initiated, uploaded, and approved budget code 0111062001 in the Government Integrated Financial Information System (GIFMIS) portal? Which Ministry, Department, or Agency desk approved the N1.3 billion line items?
Second, why did the Accountant-General’s office deploy staff to an unverified agency, and who signed off on the posting letters?
Third, who authorized the issuance of the official state gov.ng domain name to the PFIPC?
Fourth, the federal charge sheet names two co-defendants, Femi and Anu, who remain at large. Who are they, and what roles did they play within the civil service?
Fifth, since the 2026 Appropriation Act was signed into law with this N1.3 billion allocation intact, has any portion of these funds been released via the GIFMIS portal?
The Verdict
To dismiss the PFIPC affair as a simple case of personation is to ignore the structural rot it has exposed.
A con artist can forge a signature. He cannot create a new budget code in a secure federal portal, get the OAGF to deploy staff to a non-existent office, secure a government digital domain, or ensure that a N1.3 billion funding line survives executive and legislative audits to be signed into law.
The trial on July 27 must not merely convict a proxy. It must dismantle the network of insiders who turned the Nigerian budget system into an instrument for state capture.
