- Senator Already Under Radar of Intelligence Agencies.
By Yemi Yusuf with Agency Reports
Last week’s arrest and sentencing of former Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu for organ trafficking was not the first time the senator was suspected of criminal activities, TheNewDiplomat has learned.
A US intelligence analyst, Mathew Page said Ekweremadu who was jailed for nine years eight months for being “the driving force throughout” in a landmark organ trafficking plot heard at the London Old Bailey, said he has a dossier of the senator’s corrupt activities.
Page revealed that Ekweremadu was at the top of a list of nightly corrupt politicians from West Africa who send their children to very expensive private schools i the UK that are well above their legitimate incomes.
A Nigeria expert at the US state department’s bureau of intelligence and research from 2012 t0 2016, Page who is now an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, said the trafficking conspiracy showed what could happen if documented suspicions about corruption were ignored.
“Clearly the UK authorities had ample opportunity to scrutinise Ekweremadu’s UK activities before things reached the point of people-trafficking or organ harvesting,” he said.
He said his research uncovered how Nigerian politicians including Ekweremadu used unexplained wealth to buy millions of pounds’ worth of properties in the UK apart from funding expensive private education for their children.
He argued that in a 12-year period, Ekweremadu would have made about £339,000 as a political office holder, including his stint as deputy president of the Nigerian senate. But in that period he bought three properties – two in London and one in Cambridge – worth £4.2m.
Although Ekweremadu continues to deny any corruption, the analyst said there was no way the senator can justify an international property portfolio worth more than £6m. Page said he was surprised that UK authorities ignored compelling evidence against the senator until his arrest for attempting to harvest the organ of a young Nigerian trader for his daughter, Sonia, who is on dialysis.
In a 2021 paper, Page said: “Perhaps the most compelling red flag relating to west African PEPs’ [prominent politically exposed persons] payments to UK educational institutions is how greatly the payments exceed their official salaries.”
The paper said that in 2020 the average salary for a senior west African politician was £16,000, while UK private school fees were more than £35,000 a year. Page wrote: “It suggests that the tuition fee payments they [PEPs] make to UK institutions may include proceeds of crime and thus constitute an illicit cashflow.”
An official of the British government who prefers to remain anonymous confirmed they had received Page’s information about Ekweremadu but rejected his claim that it was ignored. He said the information was handled seriously, appropriately and shared with law enforcement agencies in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari reportedly told the nation’s leading agency for white collar crime, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to investigate the matter.
Ekweremadu’s lawyer pointed out that the Nigeria High Commission has previously rejected the allegations against the senator. “My client denies any allegation of corruption , as he had done throughout the entire EFCC investigation.”
Yet according to Page, Ekweremadu sold three of his UK properties in autumn 2021 before running for election as governor of Enugu state. “Records show they were sold for a combined total of £5.09m, £874,000 more than Ekweremadu paid for them.”
The senator’s son, Ike Lloyd Ekweremadu, a Nigerian lawyer, defended the sale, pointed out that his father has bought and sold properties since 1988.
Page also spoke of his concern that Ekweremadu was able to repatriate his gain on the property sale to Nigeria adding that the senator had no business getting a visa to the UK much less bringing an innocent man to the country to harvest his organ if the authorities had acted upon his findings.
Page said: “When His Majesty’s government turns a blind eye to corruption/unexplained wealth, it has unpredictable knock-on effects, including – in this case – human suffering and heinous crime in the form of organ trafficking.”
