The Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF), Shamsedeen Ogunjimi has disclosed that the fictitious Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council attempted to draw down a massive ₦27.4 billion federal grant using forged State House correspondence.
The AGF made this known when he appeared before the House of Representatives on Monday.
The disclosure came during an ongoing legislative inquiry into how the unauthorized body was created, allocated office space inside Abuja’s Federal Secretariat, permitted to open bank accounts across commercial banks, and included in the national budget.
Appearing before the committee, Ogunjimi said the Office of the Accountant-General first engaged with the purported council in November 2024 after receiving what appeared to be an authentic communication from the State House.
According to him, “a letter dated November 7, 2024, bearing a State House reference number, requested the creation of an administrative code for the Presidential Economic Advisory Council to facilitate budgeting, accounting and financial reporting.”
Using the falsified correspondence, the fraudulent entity petitioned the Treasury for the approval and disbursement of ₦27.4 billion in foreign intervention grants.
However, officials at the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation flagged irregularities in the documentation before any of the requested funds were disbursed.
Ogunjimi also noted that despite processing some administrative requests, no government funds were released to the organisation.
“It is important to note that no funds were released under salaries, overhead, capital, or any form of intervention or special allocation to the council,” Ogunjimi told the committee.
Despite the failure to secure the ₦27.4 billion grant, lawmakers expressed deep concern over how the non-existent agency managed to penetrate key government organs.
The House panel raised questions after discovering that the promoters of the group successfully secured high-profile office space within the Federal Secretariat complex, obtained approval to open accounts across numerous commercial banks, interacted with foreign diplomats under the guise of an official federal agency, and even captured line-item allocations in the national budget.
Lawmakers also criticized the gaps in administrative oversight, questioning how a completely fictitious body could navigate executive approval processes undetected for months.
The Lawmakers insisted that institutional insiders must have assisted in bypassing standard verification protocols, calling for full public testimony from key ministers, security heads, and banking regulators involved in the oversight chain while legal proceedings against the primary suspects continue in federal court.