Inside the unlikely story of how one man fooled CBN, NASS, other agencies - Businessday NG

The Presidency says the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council never legally existed. Yet the council secured a N1.3 billion budget allocation, operated accounts with the Central Bank of Nigeria, received approval to recruit more than 300 staff and held meetings with ministers, diplomats and lawmakers. Using official documents, interviews and open-source analysis, BusinessDay Investigations traces how a supposedly fictitious agency became embedded in the machinery of government.

Escaping the checks and balances of the National Assembly, the verification processes of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and oversight mechanisms within the federal bureaucracy, one man has been accused of operating a presidential council that the Presidency now says never legally existed.

For nearly two years, Adeyemi Adeniyi operated openly in Abuja as Director-General of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) and the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC). He met ambassadors, organised conferences, attended official functions and interacted with senior government officials much like the heads of other federal agencies. Then, on June 11, the Presidency publicly disowned the council.