Ghanaian Kweku Adoboli Loses Appeal To Avoid Deportation from UK

 

Kweku Adoboli has lost his appeal filed at the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal in the United Kingdom to halt his deportation.

In 2012, Adoboli, who was a director with Swiss Bank, UBS was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in an unauthorized trading that led to a loss of more than $2.4 billion.

Adoboli was released in 2015, after serving nearly three years of his prison sentence in several facilities across the country, including an immigrant detention centre in Kent.

UK law, however, stipulates that non-UK citizens whose convictions carry more than a four-year jail sentence are deported after serving their prison term.

Thirty-six-year-old Adoboli was born in Ghana, but he moved to the UK in 1991 at the age of 12. Adoboli generally excelled in school, and in his senior year between 1997 and 1998, he was made the head boy at Ackworth School.

He would later go on to study Computer Science and Management at theUniversity of Nottingham. Adoboli’s father, John Adoboli, served as a Ghanaian official at the United Nations.

Refusing his appeal to remain in the UK, the Tribunal maintained that “while he [Adoboli] was socially and culturally integrated into the United Kingdom, his family was in Ghana.” It added that he “had not established that there would be very significant obstacles in his reintegration into life in Ghana.”

Adoboli‘s family home is in Tema, southeast Ghana, 25 kilometers from Accra, but he has spent the larger part of his life in the UK — 23 years in the UK, about twice as much as he had spent in Ghana, which he left as young boy.

While Kweku Adoboli served his prison term and was released ahead of time for good conduct, the Financial Conduct Authority placed him under a lifetime ban that prevents him from working in the financial markets ever again.

Reacting to his son’s arrest in 2012, John said, “We are all reading the materials and all the things said about him. The family is heartbroken because fraud is not our way of life.”

A statement on Adoboli’s crowdfunding page, which was set up to help offset his legal fees, claims it is unfair that the UK insists on deporting him since he has zero risk of re-offending.
It insists that 23 years’ worth of lifelong relationships are being thrown away, effectively ending whatever chance he had of putting his life back together again in the only society that he had come to know and love.