Putin’s nuclear deal, a tangled web of properties and how I shone the spotlight on the murky world of holier-than-thou Tulip Siddiq_Nhy
In the end, perhaps the only surprise was why the Prime Minister allowed his scandal-hit friend Tulip Siddiq to wither so long before her inevitable pruning.
Why didn’t she go sooner? True, Sir Keir Starmer and City minister Ms Siddiq have long been friends.
But even for a Government that has seen its fair share of sleaze – think Lord Alli and freebies – she had long been much more than a ‘distraction’, the word Ms Siddiq used when resigning yesterday.
I should know. I first began investigating her for The Mail on Sunday some three years ago.
As I found, it’s one thing for Sir Keir, his wife, Angela Rayner and others to accept piles of designer clothes from media entrepreneur Lord Alli, but quite another for the minister in charge of tackling financial corruption to find herself being investigated in a billion-pound embezzlement scandal in Bangladesh (an investigation which continues).
Like Ms Siddiq, 42, I am of Bangladeshi origin and had kept half an eye on Ms Siddiq’s fortunes as she campaigned to become a Labour MP in 2015.
She was championed by, among others, actress Dame Emma Thompson. Her seat was Hampstead in north London, after all. Then suddenly Ms Siddiq became more interesting than I could have possibly imagined.
Around this time The Mail on Sunday revealed that Ms Siddiq had visited Moscow with her family two years earlier, posing for photos with Vladimir Putin. A misstep that didn’t augur well for her future parliamentary career.
Tulip Siddiq quit her Treasury post last night 26 days after the Mail revealed she was facing a major corruption probe in Bangladesh
Ms Siddiq and Sir Keir, whose constituencies neighbour each other, at the election count in 2015
Ms Siddiq (left) with her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, (centre) and Vladimir Putin (right) in 2013
Then the spotlight fell on her for another reason. It turned out she was the niece of Sheikh Hasina Wazed, then prime minister of Bangladesh, who was ruling the country with an iron fist.
In fact it was Hasina signing a £1billion arms deal with Putin and a now-infamous nuclear power deal (of which more later) that brought Ms Siddiq to Moscow – though Labour insisted that Ms Siddiq had been ‘totally separate from any official delegation but was invited to an event with her family’.
We revealed how Ms Siddiq tried to bury the Putin photo and delete posts and images on her blog that showed her campaigning for her aunt in Bangladesh in 2008.
By 2015, Hasina’s regime was characterised by allegations of human rights abuses and rampant corruption. Political opponents were made to simply disappear.
By now I was watching Ms Siddiq’s rise through the Opposition backbenches – and the volatile politics of Bangladesh – with an even keener interest.
In 2022 a holier-than-thou Ms Siddiq was noisily criticising then-chancellor Rishi Sunak over his wife Akshata’s tax affairs and non-dom status.
And she wrote an article for The Times highlighting how, increasingly, British properties were being registered in offshore tax havens.
This, she said, was a ‘way for dirty money from Russia’ to flood Britain.
I soon discovered, however, that her own mother lived in a £1.2million house in Golders Green, north London, registered in the offshore tax haven of the Isle of Man.
Ms Siddiq with her aunt, the then prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina in 2009. Hasina was disposed from office last summer after 20 years in power
Ms Siddiq acknowledged that continuing as a Treasury minister would be a ‘distraction from the work of the Government’
What is more, we found the five-bedroom house was registered using a ‘Russian doll’ system of companies, which meant examining one company revealed it was owned by yet another.
In the end we traced it to the family of Salman F Rahman, one of Bangladesh’s richest tycoons.
Hypocrisy? There was more. In April 2022 I discovered that Ms Siddiq owned a flat near London’s King’s Cross which she acquired in 2004 when she had just left King’s College London as an MA student, and appeared to have no income.
By any reckoning, this seemed rather fishy.
The more so when a perusal of Land Registry documents showed that it was either bought for cash, or, more likely, as we suspected, was gifted to her by its previous owner, Abdul Motalif, a property developer with links to her despot aunt.
It was left to the Labour Party to speak on Ms Siddiq’s behalf.
It said Ms Siddiq’s parents bought it for her from the sale of a family property.
‘Any suggestion this money came from any other source is entirely wrong and defamatory,’ a Labour official told us. There the matter temporarily rested.
Armed with new information we went back to Ms Siddiq in July 2022. She repeated that the house was bought by her parents then threatened The Mail on Sunday with legal action if we published our story.
Ms Siddiq received this two-bedroom apartment as a gift in 2004 from developer Abdul Motalif, who has links to her aunt
Sir Keir out campaigning with Ms Siddiq in Belsize Park in 2018
Once again I put the matter on the back burner but returned to it in July this year when Labour won its historic election landslide.
Ms Siddiq was now City minister and economic secretary to the Treasury, effectively the ‘anti-corruption minister’ tasked with stamping out economic crime.
It was this elevation that would lend my story, when we were eventually able to publish, ironic piquancy.
Within weeks of Labour winning the election, The Mail on Sunday published our first investigation into Ms Siddiq’s living arrangements.
Leaving aside the questions over the Kings Cross flat, we revealed how Ms Siddiq rented her family home for 14 months but did not declare it for more than a year.
Parliamentary rules require rental income has to be declared within 28 days.
Ms Siddiq apologised to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, who conducted an investigation and found that she breached the rules, but had done so inadvertently.
I sensed there was more and kept digging. Why was she renting out her family home in Finchley, north London, while living in a rented house nearby?
Things were becoming increasingly murky. I later discovered that the house she was living in was owned by a close ally of Hasina’s repressive political party, the Awami League.
Ms Siddiq strongly denies any wrongdoing and has claimed she is being politically targeted
Starmer accepted his City minister’s resignation ‘with sadness’ and said that she had made a ‘difficult decision’. (Pictured: The letter from the PM to Ms Siddiq)
This man, Abdul Karim, was given a special honour by Ms Siddiq’s aunt Hasina in Bangladesh soon after Ms Siddiq moved into the five-bedroom property. She denies any wrongdoing.
Ms Siddiq also refused to say how much rent she was paying for the property, where estate agents told us the market rate was around £5,000 a month.
But barely had the ink dried on our story, when The Mail on Sunday discovered that Ms Siddiq, along with family members, was being investigated in her native Bangladesh for allegedly taking kickbacks from the nuclear power plant deal with Russia. Yes, the one she witnessed being signed in Moscow back in 2013.
Dispatched by my editor to Bangladesh, I spent a week investigating the deal.
By this time Hasina had been deposed, and had fled to India with Ms Siddiq’s mother Rehana.
As I travelled through the congested capital Dhaka, meeting officials and investigators, I saw the burnt-out buildings and the places where police shot innocent students.
It soon transpired Ms Siddiq and members of her family were being accused of embezzling up to £3.9billion from the nuclear deal.
Ms Siddiq referred herself to Sir Laurie last week following mounting questions about her use of properties connected to her aunt
She strongly denies any wrongdoing and has claimed she is being politically targeted.
With Fleet Street on the scent, I broke the story in the Daily Mail of how Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission was now formally investigating Ms Siddiq, her mother Sheikh Rehana Siddiq, and her aunt Sheikh Hasina, for alleged embezzlement.
Weeks later the King’s Cross flat at the centre of our original investigation came back to haunt her when she was forced to admit that it had been a gift after all – from another businessman with close links to her aunt – though Ms Siddiq ‘categorically’ rejects any claim the property has links for the Awami League.
This confession prompted frantic calls from the Labour press office. Officials apologised profusely, conceding that they knew I had made the same inquiries in 2022.
The officials told me they did not ‘deliberately mislead’ me or The Mail on Sunday, but told me Ms Siddiq bought the flat with the help of her parents ‘in good faith’.
While I believe the Labour Party did not mislead me deliberately, The Mail on Sunday took the view that Ms Siddiq lied to us.
So we published our own story that weekend, detailing exactly what Ms Siddiq told us and how she had threatened to sue when cornered.
Yesterday Sir Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser who investigated Ms Siddiq, said the minister admitted to him she ‘misled’ the public when we made our 2022 inquiry about the King’s Cross property, but she said it was ‘inadvertent’.
Sir Laurie did not identify any ‘evidence of improprieties’ connected with Ms Siddiq in respect of his investigation generally.
Now Ms Siddiq has resigned – though maintains she has not done anything unlawful.
Dozens of Bangladeshis contacted me via social media, email and phone calls thanking me for investigating Ms Siddiq.
They said that her aunt’s government – from which Ms Siddiq continues to distance herself – had not only committed the worst human rights abuses in the country for the past 15 years, but they also looted the country like never before.
It was the world’s worst kleptocracy, they told me.
Today, I am pleased to have made them happy.
