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The UK’s City minister Tulip Siddiq is under renewed pressure to step down, with the leader of the opposition calling for her to be fired after she became embroiled in a property scandal tied to the ousted government of Bangladesh.
Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer should fire Siddiq, whose role covers anti-corruption policy, following allegations that she had benefited from properties linked to the Awami League, the party led by her aunt Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh.
“It’s time for Keir Starmer to sack Tulip Siddiq,” Badenoch said in a post on X on Saturday night. “The prime minister tried to make a big deal of his commitment to standards and integrity . . . His weak leadership on Siddiq suggests he is not as bothered by integrity as he claims.”
Earlier this week, Siddiq referred herself to Sir Laurie Magnus, the government’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, after a Financial Times investigation found she was given a two-bedroom flat in London’s King’s Cross in the early 2000s by a person with links to the Awami League.
On Sunday a cabinet minister suggested Siddiq would be sacked if the investigation found any wrongdoing. “The inquiry needs to go through,” science minister Peter Kyle told Sky’s Trevor Phillips.
“I think that that’s the appropriate way forward. I’m giving it all the space it needs to do. I’ll be listening for the outcome, as the prime minister will be.
“It will be a functional process, and the outcomes of it will be stuck to by the prime minister and this government, a complete contrast to what we’ve had in the past.”
Siddiq has insisted she has done nothing wrong and Number 10 insiders said that so far they had seen no proof of any breach of the ministerial code.
The City minister has also lived in several other properties that are tied to the former Awami League regime, which was toppled last summer following a student-led protest that was initially met with violent suppression by security forces that led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians.
Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist and the interim leader of Bangladesh, said in an interview with the Sunday Times newspaper that properties used by Siddiq should be returned if the minister was found to have benefited from “plain robbery”.
“She becomes the minister for anti-corruption and defends herself [over the London properties],” he said. “Maybe you didn’t realise it, but now you realise it. You say: ‘Sorry, I didn’t know it [at] that time, I seek forgiveness from the people that I did this and I resign.’ She’s not saying that. She’s defending herself.”
Siddiq was named in a probe last month by the Anti-Corruption Commission in Bangladesh after a political rival of Sheikh Hasina accused her family, including Siddiq, of taking a cut from a Russia-backed nuclear power project, claims they have denied.
After taking power in August, Bangladesh’s interim government named Ahsan Mansur, a former IMF official, to head the country’s central bank and begin clawing back billions of dollars the country’s new leaders claim were taken out of the banking system and funnelled overseas.
In an interview in October, Mansur told the FT that an estimated Tk2tn ($16.7bn) had been taken out of the country after the forced takeovers of leading banks by people linked to the Awami League, using methods such as bogus loans and inflated import invoices.
Bangladesh’s Financial Intelligence Unit last week ordered banks in the country to provide transaction details for all accounts linked to Siddiq and her family, according to people familiar with the matter.
An ally of Siddiq said that she held only a UK bank account and did not possess any accounts overseas.
Downing Street pointed to Starmer’s remarks earlier this week when he said that he had confidence in Siddiq and that she had “acted entirely properly by referring herself to the independent adviser”.
