Adeniyi Adeyemi, the detained Director General of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC), has accused the police of holding him beyond the limits of a court order and urged the House of Representatives to question him in an open session rather than behind closed doors.
In a statement issued late Tuesday in Abuja by his lawyer, Prince Ademola Oyedokun of Ademolaw Toye Law Firm, Adeyemi welcomed the House Ad-hoc Committee’s inquiry into the council. He stressed that the National Assembly draws its authority from the Nigerian people and possesses the constitutional power to establish the facts of the matter.
Oyedokun said his client has never refused to appear before the committee. Adeyemi remains in police custody and has neither been produced before the lawmakers nor brought before any court. Police told the committee that Adeyemi is being held under a court order. The lawyer countered that the order in question is a bench warrant, which only authorises arrest and production before the Federal High Court—not detention.
“A bench warrant is an order to arrest a man and bring him before the court. It is not an order to detain him,” Oyedokun stated. “The warrant directed the police to arrest our client and to produce him before the Federal High Court. They arrested him. They have not produced him. No order committing him to custody has ever been made, served on him or shown to him, and none could have been made, because he has never been brought before any court.”
An application seeking Adeyemi’s production and release is already before the appropriate court, the lawyer added.
Oyedokun called on the committee to abandon any plan for a private interview at an undisclosed time and place. Since the allegations against his client were made publicly, he argued, the responses should also be heard in public. Citing Section 89 of the Constitution, which empowers the National Assembly to summon any person and compel attendance, he urged lawmakers to direct the police to produce Adeyemi at an open sitting.
Adeyemi is prepared to appear on any date the committee sets, accompanied by counsel, and to answer every question put to him. He is not asking the committee to interfere with ongoing investigations. Questions touching matters already before a court or other agencies can be handled separately and in private if necessary. “What cannot be right is that the whole of his account be taken behind a closed door because part of it is sensitive,” the statement said.
Oyedokun emphasised that he would not litigate his client’s case in the media. The substantive allegations are before the Federal High Court and several agencies, where they will be answered on oath. The House inquiry, however, raises a distinct issue: how the PFIPC came into existence and which government officials acted on it. That is a question Adeyemi is “anxious to answer” in public.
“We ask only that they remember, meanwhile, that no court has yet heard him say a single word,” the statement concluded.
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