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Tulip Siddiq reacted with anger when she was confronted in 2017 by reporters from Channel 4 asking her to intervene in the case of Ahmad bin Quasem, a British-educated lawyer who had allegedly been abducted in Bangladesh by the regime of Siddiq’s aunt, Sheikh Hasina.
“Are you aware that I am a British MP and that I’m born in London?” she asked Alex Thomson, the channel’s chief correspondent. “Are you implying that I’m a Bangladeshi? Because I don’t think that’s the right thing to imply.”
Despite Siddiq’s insistence that she has little to do with her aunt’s now-deposed government in Dhaka, the City minister is now under pressure to explain why she has benefited from property paid for by people connected with that regime.
Siddiq, who has responsibility for UK anti-corruption policy, has referred herself to Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s independent adviser on ministerial standards, to decide whether she has broken the ministerial code.
But whatever Magnus concludes, critics say Siddiq’s desire to distance herself from her family’s authoritarian regime in Bangladesh has glossed over how close she really is to them and their Awami League party.
“Siddiq’s position is that she has no relationship with the Awami League or Bangladeshi politics, but the truth is she has been a major beneficiary of the Awami League,” said David Bergman, a Dhaka-based investigative journalist.
Rose Whiffen, a senior research officer at Transparency International, said: “Since Sheikh Hasina was swept from power in Bangladesh, there has been greater scrutiny over the support received by her niece from senior Awami League figures.
“Now that the minister has referred herself to the independent adviser on standards, the full facts surrounding this support should be established to help identify any possible undue influence or breaches of the ministerial code.”
As Hasina came to power in 2009, Siddiq was running to be a Labour councillor in London. According to a now-deleted section of her website, she also worked “for the Awami League, as part of its UK and EU lobbying unit and election strategy team”. She even appeared on the BBC World news channel as a spokesperson for the party.
Bangladeshi experts point out that at the time, Hasina was being heralded as a potentially transformative leader of Bangladesh and her party was not tainted by the scandals that dogged its later years.
But even as the years went by and Siddiq climbed the ranks of British politics, she continued to call on the Awami League for support.
In 2013, she appeared in a photograph alongside her aunt meeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow. Bangladeshi authorities are now investigating whether she helped broker a deal for the Russians to build a power plant in Bangladesh allegedly at an inflated price, allowing her family members to embezzle money from the scheme.
In 2015, Siddiq appeared at an Awami League rally in the UK soon after being elected to parliament for the first time. Her aunt also attended the rally, giving her niece a congratulatory kiss on the forehead. “Had it not been for your help, I would never have been able to stand here as a British MP,” she told the cheering crowd.
In 2017, as the case of Bin Qassem stoked headlines in the UK, she insisted: “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.”
But around the same time, she was pictured accompanying her aunt to British political events, meeting backbench MPs in Westminster, and the then Commons speaker, John Bercow.
Mubashar Hasan, a Bangladeshi political commentator, said: “If similar activities were conducted by members of the Chinese or Russian diaspora in the UK – linked to the Chinese Communist party or Vladimir Putin – and they supported a British politician of Chinese or Russian origin, it would undoubtedly be regarded as foreign interference.”
Just hours after Channel 4 aired its 2017 piece about Bin Quasem, Dhaka police raided his family home and warned his wife to “remain low”.
Bangladeshi activists say such heavy-handed tactics had by then become commonplace, with Hasina being accused of crushing political opposition and imprisoning those who spoke out against her government.
Hasina was toppled last year after a student-led uprising, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,000 people. Shortly afterwards, the Observer revealed Bangladeshi authorities were investigating whether businesses linked to the Awami League had acquired billions of pounds by illicit means and siphoned them out of the country.
Meanwhile Siddiq benefited from a series of properties paid for by people with links to the party – a flat in King’s Cross given to her for free, a flat in Hampstead once used by Siddiq and gifted to her sister for free, and a £2.1m house in Finchley, owned by a developer with political links to her aunt, where she now lives and pays rent.
It is her residence at these properties that is now under investigation after Siddiq referred herself to the prime minister’s ministerial watchdog. She denies any wrongdoing, but may face questions over whether she had properly declared the benefit she gained from the properties in question.
Downing Steet has said Magnus can decide whether he also investigates claims that she lied to reporters at the Mail on Sunday when she previously told them she had been given the King’s Cross flat by her parents.
Keir Starmer has so far backed his minister and constituency neighbour, but on Wednesday refused to comment on her case when pushed to do so in the Commons.
“The City minister has acted appropriately by referring herself to the independent adviser,” he said. “We brought in our new minister of code to allow ministers to ask to establish the facts. And I’m not going to give a running commentary.”
