Britain’s Keir Starmer faced fresh pressure on Monday to sack his anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq, as Bangladesh’s corruption watchdog filed new cases against her and her aunt, the country’s ousted leader Sheikh Hasina.
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Siddiq, 42, has been dogged by claims about her links to Hasina, who fled Bangladesh last August after a student-led uprising against her decades-long, increasingly authoritarian tenure as prime minister.
Hasina, 77, has defied extradition requests to face Bangladeshi charges including mass murder.
On Monday, Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission announced she and family members including Siddiq were subject to another corruption investigation, 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 US$5 billion connected to a Russian-funded nuclear power plant.
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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 investigation.