Before Ike Ekweremadu’s organ trafficking case became public, Mathew Page, a Nigerian expert at the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reportedly alerted the UK’s national crime agency (NCA) to the former Senate President’s activities.
Recall that on May 5th, an Old Bailey court sentenced Ekweremadu to nine years and eight months in prison, while his wife, Beatrice, received a sentence of four years and six months for the same offense. The two were found guilty of attempting to persuade medical professionals at the Royal Free hospital to perform an £80,000 kidney transplant on the donor, who was represented as their daughter Sonia’s cousin.
According to the UK Guardian, Page, an associate fellow at Chatham House, alerted UK authorities to investigate Ekweremadu’s illicit affairs before he was imprisoned.
Page claimed that if the authorities had acted quickly on his warnings about Ekweremadu, the UK could have avoided the historical case of organ trafficking.
Page, in collaboration with the UK’s Department for International Development, investigated how Nigerian politicians, including Ekweremadu, used unexplained wealth to purchase properties in the UK worth millions of pounds.
He also looked into how such politicians used funds amassed over time to fund expensive private education for their children.
The report said:
He found 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. The Old Bailey heard that Ekweremadu had an international property portfolio worth more than £6m.
Page supplied the NCA with a dossier of information about how Ekweremadu had used unexplained wealth to fund his UK activities.
Despite the warnings and financial red flags raised in the dossier, Ekweremadu’s organ trafficking plot went undetected until a young street trader from Lagos whom he had brought over fled to Staines police station in Surrey in May 2022 in fear for his life.
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