By Ishaya Ibrahim
Former Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has been jailed for 10 years and six months over a plot to harvest the kidney of a 21-year-old man, Ukpo.
Ekweremadu’s wife, Beatrice, was handed 4 years and six months jail term.
The court also sentenced the medical doctor who acted as a ‘middleman’ in the plot, Dr Obinna Obeta, to 10 years and his medical licence was also suspended.
In March 2023, a jury found that the trio criminally conspired to bring a 21-year-old Lagos street trader to London to exploit him for his kidney.
The young man was said to have been falsely presented as Sonia’s cousin in a failed bid to persuade doctors to carry out an £80,000 private procedure at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
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The young man was said to have been offered an illegal reward of £7,000 to become a donor for Sonia after kidney disease forced her to drop out of a master’s degree in film at Newcastle University.
Their conviction was the first verdict of its kind under the Modern Slavery Act.
The prosecutor, Hugh Davies KC, had told the court that Ekweremadus and Obeta had treated the man and other potential donors as “disposable assets – spare parts for reward”.
He said they entered an “emotionally cold commercial transaction” with the man.
The behaviour of Ekweremadu showed “entitlement, dishonesty and hypocrisy”, Davies told the jury.
He said Ekweremadu “agreed to reward someone for a kidney for his daughter – somebody in circumstances of poverty and from whom he distanced himself and made no inquiries, and with whom, for his own political protection, he wanted no direct contact.”
Davies added, “What he agreed to do was not simply expedient in the clinical interests of his daughter, Sonia, it was exploitation, it was criminal. It is no defence to say he acted out of love for his daughter. Her clinical needs cannot come at the expense of the exploitation of somebody in poverty.”