Earlier this month, Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate and City Minister within the Treasury, was named in an application made to the Bangladesh High Court for an investigation to be commenced by the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission, which that court did subsequently order. Siddiq is the niece of the recently-deposed Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina. It is alleged in the application that Siddiq was part of, along with Hasina and other members of her family, a scheme to embezzle $5bn from the construction of the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant. Since December 2015, the project has been majority funded by a Russian credit facility with an approximate worth of $11.38bn (the project is estimated to cost $12.65bn). Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the project has been unable to trade in US dollars, with one balance worth $318m being settled in Chinese yuan.
It is alleged that money was laundered through a network of shell companies in the UK and Bangladesh, and through a series of Malaysian banks. At it stands, these remain simply allegations, potentially politically motivated. Siddiq is yet to comment on the allegations publicly. Keir Starmer has come out in support of Siddiq, who is a close personal friend of the PM, according to reporting by the Financial Times, noting that she has not yet been contacted by the Bangladeshi authorities. The Tories and right-wing press have seized on the allegations, noting (not unjustifiably) that part of Siddiq’s ministerial brief is overseeing the prosecution of financial corruption in UK financial markets.
Sheikh Hasina’s brutal regime collapsed earlier this year and she is currently in exile in India. Since she assumed office in 2009, there have been regular accusations of corruption, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and unfair elections. According to figures reported by Human Rights Watch, at least 600 people had been disappeared under Hasina’s rule, of whom around 100 remain missing. In the latest round of protests which precipitated Hasina’s resignation in August, 440 people (mostly student protestors) were killed by the security forces, 14,000 people were arrested for perceived offences related to the protests, and a further 200,000 were charged with criminal offences. The protests were sparked by the reintroduction of quotas for civil service jobs which reserved 30% of government positions, some of the best paid jobs in the country, for descendants of veterans of the Liberation War of 1971, which would have disproportionately benefited supporters of Hasina’s party, the Awami League. The curtain of repression had already been drawn tighter in Bangladesh, in anticipation of and following renewed elections which took place in January 2024. In April, she declared the country’s largest daily newspaper, Prothom Alo ‘an enemy of the Awami League, democracy, and the people of Bangladesh’ allegedly in retaliation for a series of stories authored by journalist Shamsuzzaman Shams critical of the government’s response to the cost of living crisis. Shams had been arrested on 29th March and was facing a criminal indictment for defamation with a potential sentence of seven years in prison when Hasina’s government collapsed.
Siddiq has long denied that she has any involvement in Bangladeshi politics and has always attempted to play down connections between herself, her aunt, and the formerly-governing party in Bangladesh. Speaking to the Brent and Kilburn Times, she said that:
I am very close to my aunt as a niece would be to her auntie…We never talk about politics. I just share all my family news with her.
A Labour official speaking anonymously to the Financial Times said that ‘She has traded on these relationships and it’s unsurprising that it’s come back to bite her’ and that she had tried to ‘have it both ways with her family’ by using her connections for political advantages whilst distancing herself from the frequent and credible allegations of human rights abuses by her aunt’s government. However, Siddiq’s political and institutional connections to the Awami League, the ruling party in Bangladesh from 2009 to 2024, are long-standing. In a now-deleted blog post from 2010, she describes herself as having previously acted as a spokesperson for the Awami League in the UK and that she still worked part-time for the party. In the 2015, 2017, and 2019 general elections, according to reporting by Channel 4 News, members of the Awami League were heavily involved in campaigning for Siddiq. According to Netra News, a Bangladeshi news site, the UK-arm of the Awami League was closely associated with the central party with many of the leadership roles being appointed by the Bangladeshi-based party. Siddiq publicly thanked the Awami League after her 2015 and 2017 victories. When her aunt was Bangladeshi PM, Siddiq frequently accompanied her on foreign visits. She, for example, was present at the Kremlin in 2013 on the occasion of a new bilateral agreement between Bangladesh and Russia, including the first financial commitments for the construction of the power plant now at the centre of the renewed corruption allegations.
Siddiq is also currently living in a property owned by Abdul Karim, a member of the executive committee of the UK Awami League, which he purchased for £2.1m in July 2022 shortly before she moved in with her family. According to her own registered interests, since December 2022, Siddiq has been collecting rental income above £10,000 per year on her former residence which she joint owns with her husband. This was not declared until March 2024 after an investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, who accepted Siddiq’s explanation:
I overlooked to declare the property when it became registrable in December 2022 and only realised the error when I reviewed the first year’s rent payments.
Letter from Tulip Siddiq to the Commissioner, 31st July 2024
He concluded that the breach was ‘due to inattention’ and ‘inadvertent’ with the result that her failure to register these interests was not further referred to the Parliamentary Standards Committee. When the Daily Mail first reported on the arrangement with Karim in August, Siddiq declined to say how much she was paying in rent for the property, though more recently a person reportedly familiar with the situation told the Financial Times that Siddiq was in fact paying rent for the property at market rate (around £5000 per month). If she had or was paying below market rate, then this would have to declared in her register of interests. At the time of writing, no such entry has appeared.
Siddiq has at best shown a total indifference to the dire human rights situation in Bangladesh under the premiership of her aunt. Ahmed bin Qasim is a British-trained barrister who is the son of the now-executed leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, an opposition party in Bangladesh, was abducted in front of his family in 2016. Having undertaken legal training in the UK, he represented his father at his trial in Bangladesh in 2016. Following his abduction, his mother wrote on multiple occasions to Siddiq, who at the time was campaigning zealously for the release of her constituent, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, asking her to intervene in the case of her son. These letters reportedly went unanswered and unacknowledged. When asked by Channel 4 News about the case she implied (cynically in your writer’s opinion) that since she was not a Bangladeshi politician that she was powerless to intervene. She also seemed to take great offence to the suggestion that she should have an opinion, asking journalist Alex Thompson:
Are you aware that I am a British MP? And that I’m born in London? Are you implying that I am a Bangladeshi politician? Because I don’t think that’s the right thing to imply.
Siddiq later apologised for her behaviour in this interview, including for making a vaguely threatening remark to a pregnant producer, telling her that:
Thanks Daisy for coming. Hope you have a great birth because child labour is hard!
Ahmed bin Qasim was eventually released on 6th August 2024, one day after Sheikh Hasina fled the country, having spent eight years in a Bangladeshi prison without trial or charge, without the knowledge of either his family or legal representatives, since the authorities denied they were holding him and claimed that he had fled the country.
The latest allegations are the first suggestion that Siddiq is directly involved in financial corruption. There has never been any suggestion that she has had direct knowledge of or has been complicit in the human rights abuses, merely that she has been indifferent to them or keen to vicariously benefit from her association with the Awami League. She has, through Downing Street, strenuously denied the allegations, with Starmer’s anonymous spokesperson telling the media:
The minister has denied any involvement…Obviously, I can’t speak to the Bangladeshi anti-corruption commission, and also can’t comment on unconfirmed media speculation.
Tulip Siddiq has no far not commented publicly on any of the allegations against her. We shall see if that changes as the investigation progresses.
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