Lawyers representing Adeniyi Adeyemi, the man accused of establishing the fake Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), have accused several federal institutions of validating and facilitating the council’s operations.
In a statement signed by his legal team on Sunday, the lawyers questioned why investigators had focused criminal proceedings on their client alone.
“If the SGF, the Accountant-General, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Head of Service, the Budget Office, the EFCC, the National Assembly and the heads of Nigeria’s primary security architecture all verified, processed, funded and officially interacted with this agency over an extended period, how can a single citizen, Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, be held uniquely responsible for failing to detect what the entire apparatus of the State validated?” the lawyers asked.
“It is an administrative impossibility for an unassisted individual to mislead every arm of the federal government simultaneously without official, high-level institutional sanction,” they added.
They argued that justice could not be served by “prosecuting the mouthpiece while ignoring the state machinery that built, budgeted and bureaucratically birthed the entity.”
