Ike Ekweremadu, a former deputy president of the Nigerian senate, has been given a nine years and eight months prison sentence for a plan to traffic organs, by a court in the United Kingdom.
The court also gave his wife, Beatrice, a four-year, six-month sentence. Dr. Obinna Obeta, the doctor who served as a "middleman" in the scheme, received a ten-year sentence and had his medical license suspended.
According to reports, the jury determined that they had criminally conspired to bring a 21-year-old street trader from Lagos to London in order to take advantage of him for his kidney.
The young man was presented–falsely–to be Sonia's cousin in an unsuccessful attempt to convince medical staff to perform a $80,000 private procedure at London's Royal Free Hospital.
The Modern Slavery Act was used to sentence them at London's Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey.
The trio was found guilty in March of smuggling a young Nigerian man named David Ukpo to the UK so that Sonia Ekweremadu, the daughter of Nigeria's top senator, could receive a kidney transplant.
"In each of your cases, the offence you committed is so serious that neither a fine nor a community sentence can be justified,"Justice Johnson told the defendants.
It was the first time defendants had been found guilty of an organ harvesting conspiracy under the Modern Slavery Act.