Former Nigeria’s Senate President Ike Ekweremadu, his wife Beatrice, and Doctor Obinna Obeta have been sentenced to prison for their involvement in the organ harvesting charges brought against them by a UK court.
The former deputy senate president was jailed for Nine years and eight months while his wife received four years and six months sentence in prison.
The couple and medical ‘middleman’ Dr Obeta, 50 received 10 year prison term.
The trio were found guilty in the Old Bailey in March.
The Ekweremadus’ daughter Sonia, who has a serious kidney condition, wept as she was cleared of the same charge.
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At a sentencing hearing on Friday, Ekweremadu was jailed for nine years and eight months, his wife Beatrice was sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment while Obeta received a 10-year prison term.
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 Guardian UK report added.
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.’
On March 14, The PUNCH reported that Beatrice denied involvement in the search for an organ donor for their ailing daughter, Sonia.