The Senate is expected to address the controversy surrounding the N1.3bn allocation to the controversial Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council in the 2026 Appropriation Act as plenary resumes on Tuesday.
It was alleged that a forged appointment letter bearing a falsified signature of the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila, was accepted at the Civil Service Headquarters without adequate verification, securing Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew an office at the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja and giving the controversial agency the appearance of government legitimacy for over a year.
Multiple sources in the Presidency and the civil service with first-hand knowledge of the scandal, disclosed that the scandal would have been nipped in the bud save for bureaucratic safeguards that failed at multiple points in the Budget Office, the House of Representatives, and the Civil Service Headquarters.
The sources argued that the failure to properly scrutinise the appointment letter cascaded into the controversial Presidential Council ensnaring diplomatic missions, government ministries, the National Assembly and private individuals.
It was gathered that the N1.3bn controversial allocation was approved without Adeyemi or any official of the council appearing before the Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service to defend the budget.
A National Assembly source told one of our correspondents Sunday that the entry was made through a backdoor arrangement.
“It was not brought in as a stand-alone item. It was done collectively with others that came in directly from the Presidency. So there was no defence or oversight.
“But I understand the Senate leadership will address the controversy on Tuesday to douse the growing tension and alleged complicity by any of its presiding officers,” the official said.
Meanwhile, sources in the Presidency and civil service provided a detailed account of how the fraud circumvented the bureaucratic safety checks through the undetected forgery.
“The mistake came from several areas, the House of Representatives, the Head of Service, the Budget Office. Most of them did not do due diligence. But you see where you can’t readily blame all of them is what we call grundnorm. There is a foundation. The appointment letter was fake. It was invalid.
“In government, the way it runs is that it is the President, not the Chief of Staff, who appoints. The letter of appointment is then issued by the SGF,” a Presidency source told one of our correspondents.
Explaining the constitutional process which Adeyemi’s allegedly forged letter violated, the source argued, “Everyone who has ever been appointed by this President passed through a specific process. If your parastatal is directly under the Presidency, the SGF makes a memo to the President and the President approves the memo.
“The SGF then issues you a letter of appointment. For those in ministries, he minutes it to the relevant minister, who minutes it to the Permanent Secretary, who then gives it to the appointee. With that letter, you can enter the government payroll.
“The Chief of Staff has never appointed anyone at that level. All DGs and Permanent Secretaries, their appointments are from the President.”
A highly-placed civil servant who claimed to have reviewed the document after Adeyemi’s arrest explained that he (Adeyemi) exploited the bureaucratic blind spot.
“Where Adeniyi scammed everyone was that he forged a letter with the signature of the Chief of Staff, which was not even his signature because it was forged. It was not Gbajabiamila’s signature. The Chief of Staff cannot make such an appointment.
“Adeniyi took that fake letter, falsely signed by Gbajabiamila, to the civil service headquarters and said ‘please refer to my appointment letter attached.’ He arranged his terms of reference where he stated that he needed an office.
“The problem is, the President’s letter to the SGF or minister is not usually attached to such documentation, you are just expected to attach the appointment letter. But they were supposed to know that the Chief of Staff doesn’t appoint anyone. That was the loophole,” the official revealed.
The source further explained that said when Adeyemi was allocated an office space at the Federal Secretariat, every subsequent element of the alleged fraud became self-sustaining.
“Once you have an office there, it confers a very high level of legitimacy on you. You can meet big guests there. He had a letterhead and even a website. Once he established that office at the Federal Secretariat, every other thing followed. Nobody tried to do the needful anymore until someone raised the alarm,” said the official.
The official also confirmed that the office was locked up following Adeyemi’s initial arrest and reallocated to another official. However, he continued to operate away from the secretariat.
“The man was still running the scam after he left the secretariat, but he doesn’t use that place anymore,” the source said.
A second Presidency source said the fraud was first detected by officials of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, who noticed that the fictitious council was encroaching on their statutory mandate.
“The issue first came up from the NIPC in October last year. It started like inter-agency rivalry. That was how they saw it at the time because this fake agency was now overlapping into the mandate of the NIPC. The following day, it was taken to the Chief of Staff, who said he doesn’t know the person, and then he was the one who alerted the DSS.
“At one of the meetings about this issue, the Chief of Staff swore that he has never met the man and doesn’t even know him. And that his conscience is clear. The Chief of Staff didn’t take it lightly. He followed up until Adeniyi was arraigned in court and put on bail,” the insider said.
The source acknowledged that the prosecution lost momentum after the initial arrest, saying, “You know, when no one follows the case bumper to bumper, it can become very slow at the police. It was since October last year and when it resurfaced in June, I was surprised, because I believed it had been dealt with.
The official further revealed that several civil servants had independently identified the operation as fraudulent, stating, “Many civil servants already flagged it as a scam and it was their report that was used to alert the authorities. Some even thought that the case would unravel itself.”
A third source explained how Adeyemi may have secured a budget allocation for the council despite no formal budget defence.
According to the official, “The National Assembly, the turnover of members is quite high. Many of the people who are knowledgeable about some of these things may be gone. So a new person responsible for that committee on treaties may not really know what is happening. No one is blaming all the people there. But there needed to be due diligence which wasn’t done.
“He probably knows someone in the National Assembly and told them ‘please allocate something to us too.’ So it appeared like a government organisation that had a letterhead, an office and other things.
“All of these things, especially the fake appointment letter, conferred legitimacy on him. The whole problem stemmed from that oversight. People have been asking how he found his way into the budget.”
The source added that Adeyemi’s bail conditions had since been violated.
“The police is supposed to pick him up again. He ran foul of his bail conditions. He was actually arraigned in court. There is a big document on him from the police,” said the official. – Punch.
