The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has leveled serious allegations against the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), accusing the anti-graft agency of intentionally shielding high-ranking government officials during its probe into the questionable Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC).

In a public statement authored by its national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, the opposition party asserted that the ongoing controversy reaches far beyond Adeniyi Adeyemi, the council’s director-general, who is currently the primary individual recommended for legal prosecution. Dismissing the commission’s interim findings as both predictable and severely lacking, the ADC argued that the investigative exercise seems tailored to shield political figures rather than unearth the true scope of the administrative fraud.

The critique follows the ICPC’s recent report, which called for Adeyemi’s prosecution after determining that the PFIPC possessed no statutory authority and was entirely nonexistent as a legitimate state entity. While the commission cleared both the Presidency and the Central Bank of Nigeria of direct culpability—attributing the breach instead to systemic lapses across various ministries, departments, and agencies—the ADC countered that this narrative leaves major questions unresolved. Specifically, the party questioned how an unauthorized entity could secure physical premises within the Federal Secretariat, command the deployment of official civil servants, obtain marked vehicles and armed security, and successfully secure a reported N1.3 billion allocation within the 2026 national budget.

Reflecting on its initial call for an independent panel of inquiry when President Bola Tinubu first ordered the investigation, the ADC noted that its early skepticism has been validated by the commission’s public releases. The party maintains that framing the situation as a mere procedural error or administrative oversight is untenable given the publicly available facts. Instead, the ADC contends that a scheme of this magnitude could only succeed through active collusion and high-level coordination among prominent state actors and institutions.

Furthermore, the opposition platform criticized the ICPC’s decision to single out Adeyemi publicly while simultaneously acknowledging that investigations remain ongoing and that internal accomplices likely exist. The ADC argued that releasing a preliminary report in such a high-profile manner risks biasing the overall inquiry and falsely framing a single individual as the sole architect of a deeply systemic operation. The party emphasized that if the discovery of the PFIPC led investigators to two additional fraudulent entities linked to the same network, the focus must shift from individual wrongdoing to probing the structural vulnerabilities of the current administration.

Demanding full transparency, the ADC called for the immediate public release of the complete interim report. The party urged the ICPC to trace the paper trail behind the N1.3 billion budgetary inclusion—demanding accountability for every official involved in proposing, processing, and approving funds for a non-existent agency—and insisted that all negligent or complicit public officers face appropriate sanctions.