Exclusive: Former US intelligence analyst says he warned authorities about activities of Ike Ekweremadu
A former US intelligence analyst warned the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) to investigate the activities of a senior Nigerian politician before he trafficked a man to London in an attempt to harvest his kidney, the Guardian can reveal.
On Friday, Ike Ekweremadu wassentenced to more than nine years in prisonfor being the driving force in a plot to harvest a kidney for his sick daughter in the first organ trafficking conviction under the Modern Slavery Act.
Matthew Page, a Nigeria expert at the US state department’s bureau of intelligence and research from 2012 t0 2016 and now an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, said the plot could have been foiled if UK authorities had acted on his warnings about Ekweremadu and a dossier of material about his activities in Britain.
He said the trafficking conspiracy showed what could happen if such 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.
In research partly funded by the UK’s Department for International Development, Page examined how Nigerian politicians including Ekweremadu used unexplained wealth to buy millions of pounds’ worth of properties in the UK and fund expensive private education for their children.
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, who spent more than five years investigating senior Nigerian politicians, also said unexplained wealth had been used to pay expensive education bills for Ekweremadu’s four children. All four attended private schools in England and went on to further education at English universities.
In a2021 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.”
Page’s report noted that NCA itself had warned private schools: “If the salary of a parent is so low that they could not possibly afford the fees legitimately, this should set alarm bells ringing.”
His published research on the issues has been anonymised but in 2017 he named three key individuals involved to the NCA, senior UK diplomats in Nigeria, and Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. The first person on the list was Ekweremadu.
Page supplied the NCA with a dossier of information about how Ekweremadu had used unexplained wealth to fund his UK activities. The dossier has been seen by the Guardian. Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, is also reported to haveasked the UK’s Serious Fraud Officeto investigate Ekweremadu.
Culled From: https://www.theguardian.com/