Adeniyi Adeyemi's PFIPC: How a fake presidential council ended up in Nigeria's national budget - BBC News

The government says it was set up with a forged letter of appointment but others say there is more to it.

Image source, Instagram / @princeadeyemi_adeniyiImage caption, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, PFIPC's director general, denies any wrongdoing

How did an organisation with government offices, civil servants and a line in Nigeria's national budget turn out to have no legal basis for existing?

For much of 2025, nothing set the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) apart from the many other agencies that make up Nigeria's federal bureaucracy.

It presented itself as a body created to attract foreign investment into Africa's most populous country, operating from an office inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja - the huge complex that houses Nigeria's government ministries.

Career civil servants were assigned there and ran a website on the government's official ".gov.ng" domain. It even won approval to hire more than 300 staff, at a time when the government had frozen public-sector recruitment. The website has been taken down but its Instagram account, external is still working.