Bangladesh to seize Tulip Siddiq’s illegal funds in the UK

Bangladeshi authorities have vowed to seize funds in the UK from Tulip Siddiq which they claim were obtained through worldwide money laundering, The Telegraph reported.

Senior officials at the country’s anti-corruption commission (ACC) are “actively working to repatriate” money they say was siphoned off by her aunt Sheikh Hasina’s despotic regime.

Akhtar Hossain, the ACC’s director general, said it was liaising with “multiple countries” over investigations into the family of Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh.

Ms Siddiq is still facing questions over her property affairs and links to her aunt’s authoritarian regime in Bangladesh nearly a month after she resigned as City minister.

She was forced to resign from the front bench after Sir Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, found that she had inadvertently misled the public over a flat gifted to her by a man linked to the Awami League Party led by Hasina.

The MP, whose short-lived position as Treasury minister had included combating corruption, had referred herself after weeks of questions over her use of properties in London linked to her aunt’s political party.

Sheikh Hasina, 77, who had been the longest-serving prime minister of Bangladesh, is now in India, having been ousted last August.

It came after a brutal response to protests over the summer which resulted in the massacre of 1,500 people.

During her tenure, it was alleged that opponents were attacked, arrested and secretly imprisoned as the regime carried out extrajudicial killings.

The ACC has launched a number of investigations into Sheikh Hasina including a number where Ms Siddiq has been named.

The most serious case accuses Hasina and other family members including Ms Siddiq of being involved in the £4 billion embezzlement of funds from a nuclear power plant deal with Russia.