British Conservative Party chairman Nadhim Zahawi was removed by prime minister and party leader Rishi Sunak for breaking the Code of Conduct to which government ministers are subject on more than one occasion when he was a minister. Zahawi has hidden for years that he has big problems with the taxman: the matter emerged a few days ago, when the British newspapers revealed that the man had had to pay a sum of around 4.8 million pounds following an investigation for tax evasion initiated by the UK non-ministerial government department responsible for collecting tax.
Zahawi has repeatedly been part of governments with a conservative majority in recent years and during the brief government of Liz Truss, between September and October 2022, he was minister for equal opportunities and for intergovernmental relations. After the fall of the Truss government, new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supported his candidacy for chairman of the Conservative Party. Many now wonder if Sunak knew about Zahawi’s problems with the taxman.
He’s not the only figure close to Sunak to be embroiled in a scandal at the moment: his deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, is under investigation over allegations of bullying, while former prime minister Boris Johnson is still under investigation over parties to Downing Street organized while the country was in lockdown, between 2020 and 2021.
