The Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation has moved to settle one of the more baffling questions hanging over Nigeria’s latest governance scandal. No money, its officials say, was ever released to the Presidential Economic Advisory Council, also known in some documents as the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council, despite the body’s name sitting comfortably inside the 2026 Appropriation Act with an allocation of roughly 1.3 billion naira.
Bawa Mokwa, the office’s Director of Public Relations, laid out the mechanics of how a government account actually comes to life, and why this one never did. Opening an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria is not something any agency can simply walk in and do. It requires authorisation from the Accountant-General first, followed by the submission of authorised signatories before the account becomes operational. According to Mokwa, the council’s account-opening process began, but stalled there, because the required signatories were never submitted. No signatories, no functioning account. No functioning account, no disbursement.
He was equally direct about claims that the council had hired staff and paid salaries. Before any federal body can place new employees on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, it must first clear the Federal Character Commission, the Budget Office and the Federal Civil Service Commission. None of those approvals exist for this council, Mokwa said, which makes the idea of government-funded salaries a non-starter.
The bigger question, and the one that has kept this story alive for months, is how a body now described as fictitious ended up with a line item in the national budget at all.
The man at the centre of it is Adeniyi Adeyemi, also referred to in official documents as Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew. He presented himself as Director-General of the council, operated out of an office at the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja, and by his own account held meetings with Nigerian officials, foreign diplomats and even a Chinese investment delegation. Trouble began when staff at the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission noticed a second body performing functions strikingly similar to their own. That complaint eventually reached Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, who petitioned the Department of State Services and the police in October 2025, describing what he called an elaborate forgery and impersonation scheme. Adeyemi was arrested at his Federal Secretariat office later that month, and police investigators say he operated 34 bank accounts, nine of them registered under the names of agencies that do not exist.
Adeyemi has not backed down. He maintains the council is real, that it has an office, bank accounts and a legitimate appointment behind it, and he has fired back with his own allegations, including a claim that Gbajabiamila collected 400 million naira through a proxy and demanded more to secure his position. The Presidency has firmly denied this. Adeyemi is due back in court on July 27.
What nobody in government has fully explained is how a council the Presidency now calls fictitious survived every stage of the budget process, from the Budget Office through the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly, all the way to presidential assent, without anyone raising a flag. Civil society groups, including the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, have given the Senate President and the Speaker of the House a week to release documents explaining exactly how that allocation was approved.
Until those answers arrive, the Accountant-General’s position is the one fact both sides seem to agree on. Whatever else happened, the money itself never moved.
