Source : NEW INDIAN EXPRESS NEWS
LONDON: Anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq resigned from the UK government on Tuesday after being named in probes in Bangladesh into graft accusations against the country’s ousted leader, her aunt, Sheikh Hasina.
In a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Siddiq repeated she had done nothing wrong but said continuing her job in the Treasury office would likely “be a distraction from the work of the government”.
Starmer said he accepted her resignation with “sadness.”
It is the second ministerial resignation from his government and will be a heavy blow to Starmer’s Labour Party which has struggled since it swept to victory in July elections after 14 years of Conservative Party rule.
Siddiq, 42, has been dogged by claims about her links to Hasina, who fled Bangladesh in August after a student-led uprising against her decades-long, increasingly authoritarian tenure as prime minister.
Since being ousted, Hasina, 77, has defied extradition requests to face Bangladeshi charges, including of mass murder.
On Monday, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission announced she and family members, including Siddiq, were subject to a second graft probe, this time over an alleged land grab of lucrative plots in a suburb of the capital Dhaka.
Family members including Siddiq had already emerged as named targets of the commission’s investigation into accusations of embezzlement of $5 billion connected to a Russian-funded nuclear power plant.
Bangladeshi money laundering investigators have since ordered the country’s big banks to hand over details of transactions relating to Siddiq as part of the probe.
In her letter of resignation, Siddiq said her “family connections were a matter of public record” and that she had acted with “full transparency”.
She insisted her “loyalty is and always will be” to the Labour government and the “programme of national renewal and transformation it has embarked upon”.
“I have therefore decided to resign from my ministerial position.”
SOURCE :- NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
