The opposition party calls the ICPC’s interim report “predictable and inadequate,” demanding the full document be published.
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has accused the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) of shielding some government officials in its investigation into the controversial Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC).
The matter remains under active investigation and is sub judice.
In a statement issued on Saturday by Bolaji Abdullahi, its National Publicity Secretary, the ADC insisted the controversy extends beyond Adeniyi Adeyemi, PFIPC’s self-proclaimed Director-General, who has been recommended for prosecution.
The opposition party described the ICPC’s interim report as “predictable” and “inadequate,” alleging it was more concerned with protecting government officials than uncovering the full extent of the scandal.
Why the ADC says the ICPC report raises more questions than answers
The ICPC had, on Thursday, recommended Adeyemi’s prosecution after concluding the council had no legal backing and never existed as a government agency.
The commission also cleared the presidency and the Central Bank of Nigeria of wrongdoing, attributing the fraud instead to institutional lapses across several ministries, departments and agencies.
Reacting, the ADC said the report failed to explain how a fictitious agency allegedly secured office space within the Federal Secretariat, had civil servants deployed to it, and appeared in the 2026 budget with a reported N1.3 billion allocation.
“With the so-called interim report of the ICPC, our fears have come to pass as the report is not only predictable, it appears more concerned with exonerating government officials rather than providing clear answers to the serious questions that the scandal has raised,” the party said, recalling that it had opposed Tinubu’s decision to task the ICPC with the probe from the outset, favouring an independent panel instead.
The ADC argued that the ICPC’s characterisation of the episode as a procedural failure was inconsistent with available evidence.
“This position is difficult to sustain in the light of publicly available evidence, which establishes that this is not an error of omission or a mere glitch in the system. Instead, what happened was a grand scam that could have been possible only with the active connivance of government officials and institutions at the highest level,” the party said.
The ADC also questioned why only Adeyemi was recommended for prosecution despite the ICPC acknowledging that investigations were ongoing and could implicate others.
“If, according to the ICPC report, Adeyemi had kicked down the door of the Secretariat office and allocated it to himself, did he also deploy the civil servants to himself, allocate a reported N1.3 billion to himself in the 2026 Appropriation Act, allocate official vehicles with customised number plates to himself and deploy armed security to himself?” the party asked.
ADC demands publication of full report
The party said the discovery of two additional fictitious agencies allegedly linked to Adeyemi should have widened the scope of the investigation rather than narrowed its conclusions, and demanded the ICPC explain how PFIPC secured a line in the 2026 Appropriation Act.
“The ADC therefore expects the ICPC to tell Nigerians who proposed the allocation, who processed it, who verified the beneficiary agency and how a body that the presidency now says never existed survived the scrutiny required to appear in an Appropriation Act,” the statement read.
The ADC called for the immediate publication of the full interim report and also urged the ICPC to identify and sanction every public official whose actions or negligence enabled the alleged fraud.
“Nigerians are not asking the government to manufacture culprits; they are asking it to follow the evidence wherever it may lead,” the party said.
