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A court in Bangladesh has sentenced British MP and former City minister Tulip Siddiq to two years in jail in a corruption case involving the allocation of a plot of land.
The Labour MP, who resigned as a minister in January, was found guilty of influencing her aunt, ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina, to bypass eligibility rules and benefit from unlawful allocation of government plots in a project on the outskirts of Dhaka.
The verdict was delivered in absentia as the accused — including Siddiq, Sheikh Hasina, and Sheikh Rehana, who is Sheikh Hasina’s sister and Siddiq’s mother — were not in the country. The sentence is unlikely to be enforced as the UK does not have an extradition treaty with Bangladesh.
On Monday, Rabiul Alam, of Dhaka Special Judge Court, said Sheikh Hasina misused her power as prime minister and sentenced her to five years in prison. Sheikh Rehana was given seven years in prison.
Prosecutors said they had produced documents, correspondence, messaging app conversations and witness testimony to show that Siddiq leveraged her family ties and political connections to Sheikh Hasina and her office to secure approval of plots for some of her family members in breach of allocation rules.
Mainul Hasan, a prosecutor for the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), said Siddiq had personally pushed for the land allocations.
“Tulip insisted that her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, allocate plots for her mother and siblings,” he said, alleging that Siddiq “communicated directly” with Sheikh Hasina’s principal secretary “to secure these allocations”.
Sheikh Hasina, whose 15-year rule was marked by accusations of authoritarianism, electoral manipulation and cronyism, was ousted from power in August 2024 by a student-led protest movement that erupted into nationwide unrest, forcing her to flee to India. Last month, she was sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity over her role in a deadly crackdown during the uprising that toppled her government.
Her departure cleared the way for an interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to launch sweeping corruption probes, some led by the ACC, into the former leader’s administration and family. His government in May also banned the Awami League from political activity, ahead of elections set for next year.
Siddiq, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, has called the trial “a persecution and a farce”. Last week, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate thanked a group of “distinguished lawyers” including Cherie Blair “for calling out the fundamental flaws in the criminal justice system in Bangladesh — a system that now seems set to convict me”.
“Tulip has made it very clear that she denies any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Darren Jones, UK minister for intergovernmental affairs and chief secretary to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, said on a TV news programme. “She’s concluded it’s a kind of more a political operation than a legal one.”
Sheikh Hasina’s party, the Awami League, criticised the court verdict as “entirely predictable”, adding that the allegations against the former prime minister and many “members of her immediate and wider family are firmly denied.
“No persuasive evidence of corruption was heard at the ACC, because none exists,” the party said in a statement representing the family. “Defendants did not have proper legal representation at the ACC and were judged in absentia.”
Sheikh Hasina condemned the investigation as “controlled by an unelected government run by the Awami League’s political opponents” and accused Yunus’s administration of “using the ACC as a smokescreen to distract attention from his own governance failings”.
Additional reporting by George Parker in London
