Reported by: Oahimire Omone Precious | Edited by: Oravbiere Osayomore Promise.
The State House on Thursday, August 6, 2026, firmly denied any involvement in the establishment of the controversial Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), telling the House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee investigating the phantom agency that it never requested a budget code for the council nor authorised its creation. The denial came as the committee uncovered fresh inconsistencies between documents obtained from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (OAGF) and official records supplied by the State House.
Appearing before the committee at the National Assembly Complex in Abuja, the Director of Administration at the State House, Abdulkadri Idris, who represented the Permanent Secretary, distanced the Presidency from the council. “I want to state that we did not send any correspondence nor any request to the Office of the Accountant-General in respect of this council. We don’t even know anything about this council. We never heard about this council until we started seeing it in the media,” Idris said. He further stated that the State House has no statutory responsibility for establishing government agencies and therefore could not have issued any communication creating the council.
Idris also dismissed as fraudulent documents presented to the committee that purportedly originated from the State House. He noted that one of the documents was allegedly signed by one “Akande Adewale” as Director of Administration and Support Services, an office and an individual that he said never existed in the Presidency. “I presented the list of Directors of Administration in the State House from 2003 to date, and there was no name resembling Akande Adewale. In addition, there is no department known as Directorate of Administration and Support Services in the State House. We have only the Department of Administration. Akande Adewale has never, ever been Director of Administration in the State House,” he clarified.
The State House submitted official records, including authentic letterheads and a historical list of Directors of Administration, to support its position. The committee also received evidence that the State House denied issuing any appointment letter to the purported Director-General of the council, Adeniyi Adeyemi, maintaining that appointments of chief executives of federal agencies are political appointments conveyed by the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation.
Following the testimony, the committee chairman, Yusuf Gagdi, said the evidence presented by the State House contradicted documents earlier obtained from the Accountant-General’s Office. “The State House has denied that it ever wrote any letter to the Accountant-General requesting budget codes. Secondly, there is no Directorate of Administration and Support Services as contained in those documents. The Accountant-General responded to an office that the State House says does not exist, while the name of the signatory, Akande Adewale, is absent from all official records submitted to this committee,” Gagdi said. He described the contradictions as a significant development in the investigation into how official government processes were allegedly manipulated to give legitimacy to the phantom agency.
The PFIPC has come under intense scrutiny after the Presidency declared it an unauthorised agency. It was also revealed that the phantom agency received an allocation in the 2026 Appropriation Act and opened accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The House committee is investigating how the PFIPC was allegedly created, secured official government recognition, and was integrated into aspects of the Federal Government's administrative and budgetary processes despite questions over its legal status.
The investigation continues as the committee works to determine how official government processes were allegedly manipulated to give legitimacy to the phantom agency.
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