A jailed Nigerian smuggler who imported drugs worth millions of pounds into the UK has landed in more trouble after being ordered to hand over £1.2m or have seven years added to his sentence. A judge told Patrick Udensi, 36, from North London, to pay the sum after National Crime Agency (NCA) officers discovered he had valuable assets in Nigeria.
Nigerian national Udensi is serving a 15-year prison sentence after smuggling parcels of cocaine and cannabis with street value of £1.8m to addresses in North London.
He laundered the proceeds of his crimes by buying car parts in the UK and shipping them to Nigeria where they were sold on the open market on his behalf.
According to a report by the National Crime Agency (NCA), If he fails to pay cash equal to the value of his Nigerian assets, which the NCA successfully argued in court were the benefit of a criminal lifestyle, he will have seven years and six months added to his sentence and will still owe the money when he comes out.
Udensi was convicted in 2015 following an NCA investigation. An associate, John Arinze Nwosu, 44, from Edgebaston, Birmingham , absconded before trial and was sentenced to five years in prison in his absence.
Telephone and email records showed Udensi had used Skype, Yahoo Messenger, iMessage and WhatsApp to communicate with drug distributors in Africa, Asia and South America, advising them of names and addresses to send the parcels to.
He was found guilty of conspiring to import class A and class B drugs following a trial at Isleworth Crown Court, and he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
A second man, John Arinze Nwosu, 42, from Edgbaston, Birmingham, a key organiser for the network, absconded from bail prior to trial, but was convicted in his absence and sentenced to 5-and-a-half years.
Ian Truby, senior investigating officer for the NCA’s Heathrow border investigation team, said: “This organised crime group used a ‘small but often’ method, smuggling packages of class A and B drugs which weighed anywhere between a few grammes and several kilos.
The NCA are appealing for information on Nwosu’s whereabouts.
investigation found evidence of 77 such importations, but in reality there were probably far more stretching back years.
“As we started intercepting packages and they failed to arrive at their destinations Udensi became increasingly agitated. By the time we arrested him he must have begun to suspect the game was up.
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