He Paid N400 Million to a Fake Government Agency. It Had Real Government Number Plates. Nobody Has Explained How.

On Tuesday, a businessman named Gbenga Collins sat before a House committee and explained, in plain and exhausted language, how he lost N400 million to an agency that legally did not exist. I have written about the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council three times now, each time from the vantage point of budgets and registers and statutes. This week the committee finally heard from the person the abstraction happened to.

Collins runs a company called Divine Dopacy Nigeria Limited. He met Adeniyi Adeyemi, the man now in police custody over the PFIPC affair, at a hometown event in Ogbomoso in December 2024. What convinced him this was a real government relationship, and I think this detail deserves to sit at the centre of the story rather than the edge of it, was almost entirely visual. A Lexus SUV with a federal government registration plate collected him from the airport. Adeyemi's office sat inside the Federal Secretariat in Abuja. Security personnel stood around him. People Collins described as dignitaries came and went. Nothing about any of it looked improvised.

Adeyemi told Collins he had been allocated an official residence as director general and offered his company the renovation contract. He took Collins to see the property himself, with a small convoy of staff and security. He then asked for N400 million as proof of financial capacity and to fast track mobilisation. Collins paid it in five instalments between May and July 2025, most of it into an account held by a company called World Entrepreneurs Limited, the rest into an account belonging to a catering business. He raised the money from business associates who trusted him because he had personally seen the office and the property and believed, reasonably, that he was dealing with a federal official.

Mobilisation never came. First it was pushed to August, then blamed on unspecified security concerns, then promised again for November. Collins kept calling. Eventually Adeyemi stopped answering, and a lawyer told Collins what he had already begun to suspect. He filed a petition with the EFCC in November. He told the committee he has since started selling property to survive what the scam did to his business and to the relationships with the people who trusted him with their money.

Nobody checked whether the plate on that Lexus was legitimate before Collins handed over four hundred million naira. The plate was doing the checking for him, and the plate was wrong. This is the part of the story that matters most to me, more than the amount, more than the betrayal of a hometown connection. Collins did not fail to exercise diligence. He exercised exactly the diligence an ordinary Nigerian businessman is equipped to exercise. He looked at the physical, official markers of state authority, a federal number plate, a Federal Secretariat office, uniformed security, and he trusted them, because those markers are supposed to mean something and supposed to be hard to fake.

When I first wrote about PFIPC, the story was N1.3 billion sitting in a budget line with no legal instrument behind it. That number was easy to treat as an accounting failure, something that lives in a spreadsheet somewhere in Abuja. Collins is the reminder that behind the spreadsheet is a person who sold property he had worked for because a government agency that should never have received a naira looked, felt, and drove exactly like a real one.

Something new came out of Tuesday's hearing that the earlier budget story did not surface. Committee members pressed on how vehicles connected to a fictitious council obtained genuine federal government registration plates in the first place. Nobody had an answer in the room, so the committee has summoned the Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps to appear and explain the process by which those plates get issued and how this particular set slipped through it.

Nigeria has now discovered that its budget verification failed, its asset recovery record keeping failed, and its vehicle registration system failed, each one surfacing separately, each one only after somebody it happened to had already paid the price. I do not think these are three unrelated coincidences. I think they are the same institutional habit wearing three different uniforms. Somewhere between the law that says a thing must be verified and the office that actually verifies it, Nigeria keeps leaving a door unlocked, and it keeps discovering the door was unlocked only by watching someone walk through it first.

Adeyemi himself has still not appeared before the committee. He remains in police custody under a court order the chairman, Yusuf Gagdi, says the legislature will not attempt to override, citing separation of powers. That is a legally sound position and I do not fault it. But it means the man at the centre of this, the one whose office convinced Collins the plates were real, will keep being questioned by everyone except the public body that is supposed to answer to the public for what happened. The committee says it will meet him privately instead, in the presence of his lawyers, at a location it will not disclose, because the EFCC, the ICPC, and the courts are all handling separate pieces of the same file.

I understand the caution. I also keep coming back to Collins, sitting in that hearing room, describing the sale of his own property in the same even tone he used to describe the vehicle plate that fooled him. The committee will finish its hearings this week. A report will eventually reach the House. Whatever it recommends about registers and verification and procurement, I hope somewhere in it there is a specific answer to the specific question nobody in that room could answer on Tuesday. How does a government vehicle registration system hand real plates to a fake agency, and what, other than one more summons after the money is already gone, is going to stop it from happening again.