UK treasury and anticorruption minister Tulip Siddiq has resigned over a flurry of media reporting about her links to corruption charges being faced by her aunt, the deposed Bangladeshi former prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, as well as how properties Siddiq’s family owns in the UK were paid for.
Following the general election in July, Prime Minister Keir Starmer awarded Siddiq, 42, the portfolio for financial services policy. Her responsibilities included implementing measures to combat money laundering.
However, in a letter to Starmer on Tuesday, Siddiq said she was resigning from her position because the furore over her links to her aunt and questions about who paid for London flats was “likely to be a distraction from the work of the government”.
She is the second Labour government minister, after Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, in two months to resign from Starmer’s cabinet amid the prime minister’s falling approval rating since taking up the position.
Siddiq has been the Labour member of parliament for the north London constituency of Hampstead and Highgate, previously Hampstead and Kilburn, since 2015.
In December, the minister was named in a corruption inquiry in Bangladesh alongside her family and Hasina’s daughter Saima Wazed, the World Health Organization’s Southeast Asia chief, into whether the family was taking funds from infrastructure projects in Dhaka.
In particular, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) said it was investigating the family over an alleged link to the embezzlement of $5bn related to the construction of a power plant in Rooppur, 160km (99 miles) northwest of the capital Dhaka, and fraudulently obtaining plots in the diplomatic zone of a development close to Dhaka.
On Monday this week, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission announced that it had filed charges against the family.
Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) director general Akhter Hossain told the news agency AFP on Monday, that it has “obtained the necessary documents and found sufficient evidence to file the cases”.
Following the allegations, Siddiq referred herself to the UK parliament’s ethics board over questions about whether London properties she held had been paid for by allies of Hasina’s regime.
The matter was investigated by Laurie Magnus, an adviser on ministerial standards.
According to documents filed with Companies House and the Land Registry, Siddiq was living in one London property given to her family in 2009 by Moin Ghani, a lawyer who has represented the deposed Bangladeshi leader’s government. A second property in London’s Kings Cross was also found to have been given to her by Abdul Motalif, an associate of members of the Awami League party.
