Police have arrested the father and a family friend of Adeniyi Adeyemi, the fugitive and disowned Director-General of the disputed Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, in Osogbo, even as the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation disputed claims that the controversial council ever had a functioning CBN account.
Human rights lawyer Femi Falana disclosed the arrest, saying police stormed the family’s residence in Ogbomoso and took away Adeyemi’s father along with a visiting family friend. “Police have now stormed the house of the parents of Prince Adeyemi Adeniyi… The father has been arrested. There is no legal basis for substituted arrests. The young man has promised to show up in court, so why arrest his father?” Falana said. Neighbours confirmed the account, with one resident describing officers arriving in four vehicles and taking the father away without allowing anyone to intervene, leaving Adeyemi’s mother in shock. Oyo Police Command spokesperson DSP Ayanlade Olayinka said the matter falls outside his jurisdiction, directing inquiries to the Force Criminal Investigation Department in Abuja, which is handling the case as one of national interest.
The arrest came the same day the OAGF pushed back against the Presidency’s earlier account of how the council’s finances worked. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga had said Adeyemi fraudulently opened a CBN account by misleading the OAGF using fake documents, while maintaining no government money was ever transferred into it. But OAGF Director of Public Relations Bawa Mokwa said the account was never actually activated, an application was initiated after Adeyemi presented an appointment letter tied to an existing agency, but it stalled because the required list of authorised signatories was never submitted. “The account has not seen the light of day. It has not received one kobo because it was never fully activated,” Mokwa said, adding that a budgetary allocation in the Appropriation Act does not automatically translate into released funds.
Mokwa also dismissed claims that the council had paid staff salaries, explaining that no federal agency can process payroll without approvals from the Federal Character Commission, Budget Office and Federal Civil Service Commission, none of which the PFIPC obtained. He said Adeyemi employed no staff beyond officers deployed from the OAGF itself, who will now serve as prosecution witnesses.
The council was allocated ₦1,302,978,784 in the 2026 budget, split across personnel, overhead and capital costs, an allocation that has fuelled the broader controversy since the Presidency insists the agency never legally existed. Adeyemi is facing forgery and impersonation charges before a Federal High Court in Abuja, a case Falana has argued should be resolved strictly through due process rather than actions against his family. The scandal, which surfaced after the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission flagged overlapping functions in October 2025, has since drawn calls from opposition figures including Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi for an independent panel to investigate how a disowned agency ended up funded in the national budget.
