Despite clemency pleas by prominent Nigerians and institutions including former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the National Assembly and kinsmen, a London court, Friday, went ahead to slam a nine years and eight months jail on former Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu.

In what was Britain's first illegal organ-harvesting prosecution under the Modern Slavery Act, Ekweremadu's wife Beatrice, 56, and London-based doctor Obinna Obeta, 51, were also sentenced to four years and six months, and ten years, respectivel.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, they were jailed for conspiring to arrange the travel of a man in order to harvest his organs.

They were convicted in March of trafficking a street trader from Lagos to Britain to illegally harvest his kidney for a transplant for their sick daughter, Sonia.

The jury said Ekweremadu, his wife and their doctor criminally conspired to bring the 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.

The young man was said to have been offered an illegal reward to become a donor for Sonia after kidney disease forced her to drop out of a master’s degree in film at Newcastle University.

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.”

Obasanjo had written the court pleading for clemency on behalf of the convicted lawmaker, quoting the ill health of Sonia and Ekweremadu’s service to humanity.

Obasanjo’s plea was also followed by same from both chambers of the National Assembly; Senate and House of Representatives.