In this feature, VICTOR AYENI writes about how the director of a United Kingdom-based social care recruiting agency, Lekan Ayuba, allegedly used his former employees to lure in applicants and amass wealth through dubious promises of care jobs and non-existent Certificates of Sponsorship

In the “About Us” section of the website of Click Operations, a United Kingdom-based firm, it described itself as “a healthcare recruitment agency” that helps to “recruit and re-train a team of highly trained, compassionate, and dedicated care workers” providing care throughout the UK.

A care worker, according to a British home learning website, www.ncchomelearning.co.uk, is “a trained professional who supports other people in all aspects of their daily life” which includes preparing and eating meals, socialising, physical activities, and medical support.

While some care workers work in care homes, others are employed on a contract basis in patient’s homes, while domiciliary carers travel to different people’s houses in the community.

Unfortunately, many Nigerian applicants who relied on the director of Click Operations, Lekan Ayuba, to provide them with their Certificates of Sponsorship to enable them to enter the UK, have described the claims on his agency’s website as “mere window dressing to lure in desperate people.”

According to the latest State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce Report, 9.9 per cent of positions in the care industry in the UK were vacant between 2022 and 2023, which is equivalent to 152,000 vacancies being advertised on an average day.

As a result of this shortfall, many UK employers rely on recruiting adult social care workers from other countries such as Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and India.

Some of these applicants, now stranded in Nigeria, told Saturday PUNCH that they frittered millions of naira on medical tests, international driving licences, police reports, and obtaining the CoS to travel to the UK, but Ayuba reportedly kept postponing the delivery of their CoS.

The applicants also alleged that since last year when they parted with their money, Ayuba refused to refund them and abruptly stopped communicating with them.

A travel agent, Funmilayo Dan-Musa, alleged that her 18-year-old nephew who needed to be flown to the UK for medical treatment died while Ayuba kept deceitfully delaying her after he collected monies for application, documentation, and health insurance from her.

She further stated that Ayuba had blocked her along with other primary applicants on his social media accounts and left her indebted to the people she recommended him to.

After their stories were published by Saturday PUNCH two weeks ago, some former Nigerian employees who worked with Ayuba in the UK, contacted our correspondent and accused him of using them to get more clients and amassing wealth for himself.

However, citing security reasons, the ex-employees preferred not to have their full names disclosed.

They accused Ayuba of financially extorting people by promising to issue them CoS, refusing to refund them their money, owing his former staff, and arbitrarily removing them from the company when they stopped bringing applicants to his agency.

‘He made money deceiving people’

Speaking with Saturday PUNCH, a former Business Development Manager at Click Operations, simply known as Mr Joel, said Ayuba met him in a church in 2022, where he told him that he owned a care agency and that he had lots of contracts all over the UK.

This, he alleged, was later found to be untrue, after he was employed by the agency and he realised it had only a client.

“Ayuba begged me to work with him to build the business and I agreed. He (Ayuba) would often give instructions about which accounts we were to transfer the money from applicants. Some of this money was transferred to his account, some of which he refunded but left with £180,000.

“Most of his dealings with these people were based on lies, so when these people started asking for refunds, he would deceive them. Because we didn’t have access to his lawyer, he was the only one communicating with his lawyer, so whatever he told us was what we relied upon as the director of the company.

“It was much later we realised that he wasn’t who we thought he was. Now, he has gone incommunicado; he has blocked us on WhatsApp and changed his number. He sent someone to tell us that he’s a British citizen and nobody can do anything to him. He threatened that if we ever came to his house, he would call the police on us,” Joel said.

Joel’s wife, Ruth alleged that although Ayuba made some refunds to some of the people they brought who paid for their recruitment process, he still owed them a total of £180,000.

She said, “Lekan signed a document with one of the people who paid him where he stated how much he was owing us and how he intended to fully refund. We have evidence of this.

“We held a meeting with Lekan where a clergyman tried to settle us amicably, and in this meeting, Ayuba admitted to taking the sum of £180,000 from us and promised to pay up in August 2024.

“People are dragging us left and right for recommending him to them, people are crying because of the money he withheld. What we want for Lekan Ayuba to come up and refund their money and stop hiding.”

Also speaking with Saturday PUNCH, a former manager at the company who gave her name as Deola said she became friends with Ayuba in 2020 and through her, got his firm registered with the Care Quality Commission, a government agency that regulates all health and social care services in the UK.

“Before you can run a domiciliary healthcare in the UK, you need to be regulated by the CQC and go through a registration process. You’d need a registered manager and a nominated individual. Lekan knew I had the experience and right qualifications, so he asked me to join his team and I agreed. I got his business registered in November 2023,” she revealed.

Deola alleged that Ayuba deceived her to believe that he had a contract but it was the CQC registration that was delaying it.

“He asked me to bring people to pay for the recruitment process and they gave him money. All the money I gave him was cash and he sent one of his employees to come and pick up the money from my house. That was between September 2023 and January 2024. Thousands of pounds from people were also given to Lekan which were picked up in cash under his instructions by former employees of his organisation.

“All these people who paid were added to a WhatsApp group and Lekan was the group admin. Later, the whole thing got ugly, people were demanding refunds and Ayuba kept telling different stories to the middleman between us through whom some of these applicants came.

“Eventually, the middleman and some individuals confronted Ayuba at his house, and the police got involved. He lied that they wanted to kidnap him. This led to the middleman’s arrest and Ayuba also accused me of being the mastermind of the kidnap, and denied collecting any money from me,” she added.

Duping the desperate

A former Director of Operations at Click Operations, Theresa Omotayo, said when she met Ayuba through a colleague, he assured her that he was building a care company, which led her to resign from her previous job and join his team.

She added, “Ayuba offered me a job with sponsorship and told me about his contracts in several parts of the UK, and his plan to provide training for international candidates that he intended to sponsor.

“It was when I joined the company that I discovered that his company didn’t have numerous contracts like he claimed. He didn’t even have the CQC accreditation to sponsor caregivers.

“He got me involved in training international candidates on soft skills, asking me to create a relevant and complete curriculum and not rush the training, as he wanted the carers to be well trained and grounded before their arrival into the country. I didn’t know he had already charged these candidates and was buying himself more time with the training.”

Omotayo also alleged that for months, no visas were granted and candidates began to ask for refunds, some of which she said Ayuba paid back.

“We were still processing this when he (Ayuba) suddenly removed all of us from the company’s WhatsApp group. He said the company has folded up but the fact is, the company never folded up. He is still operating his business using another set of people,” she added.

Staff owed

Another former employee, Joy Opeoluwa, said she started working with Ayuba and Click Operations in late 2022.

“I went on leave in late January this year and resumed back in March. At this point, I was already owed a month’s salary. I asked Lekan (Ayuba) what was happening, and he assured me that he would start to pay the carers and my pending salary, as he claimed he was trying to get more contracts.

“Then I found out from emails of complaints to the company, several of which Lekan deleted, that he had allegedly collected very large sums of money, surpassing £500,000 from persons for legal visa applications fees in addition to him owing other in-house staff salaries as well.

“Carers going on shift were in distress as they weren’t getting paid. I sent Lekan screenshots of their complaints but he appeared unbothered and said they would be fine. When I challenged him about it, he decided to remove me from the company’s platform. My company email stopped working and due to that I had to tender my resignation,” Opeoluwa told Saturday PUNCH.

She accused Ayuba of still owing her three months’ salaries aside from other allowances.

“I tried reaching out to him through text messages, but I was told several times that he was working on it. As of now, he’s changed his numbers, and isn’t responding to emails,” Opeoluwa added.

Also speaking with Saturday PUNCH, a former employee, Dare Olatunji, alleged that neither Ayuba nor his lawyer had processed any of the visa applications for the candidates.

Olatunji said, “If the government didn’t take the money from you, and these monies were all handed over to you, where is their money? Why hasn’t Ayuba returned the money he took from people? He can’t say he gave the money to the government or that he paid his staff with them either because the company was self-sufficient.

“The employees worked hard to gain their clientele for the company, and from July 2023, the company could boast of sustainability after salaries were paid. As soon as issues came up within the company regarding his fraudulent activities, he decided to dissolve the company through several meetings by refusing to pay employees’ salaries, which led to resignations.”

These are faceless individuals – Ayuba

When Saturday PUNCH again reached out to Ayuba to respond to the allegations on Wednesday, he explained that Click Operations was owned by his brother and he could not respond to the first publication two weeks ago because he was on a business trip.

“The company is not owned by me, but by my brother, and when you sent that mail, he was about to go on a business trip and he said when he came back he was going to respond to that mail. He was on a business trip when I sent the link to him.

“We were surprised and he advised me to leave it so that he wouldn’t get entangled in a blackmail. How many people did we train that these people are accusing us?” he asked.

He told our correspondent to send again the list of the allegations made against him by his former employees.

When he received a mail that summed up the allegations, he demanded that the personal identities of those who accused him be revealed by our correspondent.

“Thank you for your email, kindly let me know their names as anyone can claim to be anything in my company. Kindly let me know what each of them is alleging me for,” Ayuba’s email read.

When our correspondent notified him that the former employees had chosen to be given pseudonyms for safety reasons, Ayuba described them as “faceless individuals.”

He wrote, “These are faceless individuals. How do I respond to such allegations? How are we sure that it is not just some miscreants that concocted lies just for malicious intent?

“I will not respond to such malicious accusation. You are an investigative journalist, you know the right thing to do. Thank you very much.”

Saturday PUNCH also emailed the UK Home Office on September 28 regarding the allegations made against Click Operations but had yet to receive a reply as of the time of filing this report.