Nadhim Zahawi's extraordinary rise and fall

Nadhim Zahawi’s sacking as Conservative party chair-man last Sunday caps an extraordinary downfall for a man who less than a year ago ran to be Conservative party leader and, with it, prime minister of the UK.

-  Josh Halliday

 

Zahawi is, by some measures, one of the most remarkable politicians of his generation. Born in Iraqi Kurdistan, he came to England in 1978 when his family fled Saddam Hussein’s regime. The “boy from Baghdad ”, as Zahawi calls himself, initially struggled to settle in and his parents were warned he may suffer from learning difficulties due to his initial inability to speak English.

He overcame those setbacks and entered politics, serving for 12 years as a borough councillor in Wandsworth, south-west London. In 2000, Zahawi co-founded the polling company YouGov with fellow Conservative Stephan Shakespeare. It floated on the stock market five years later.

The row surrounding Zahawi centred on a tax bill over the sale of shares in YouGov – worth an estimated £27m ($33m) – which were held by Balshore Investments, a company registered in Gibraltar and linked to Zahawi’s family.

The 55-year-old has for years faced questions over his links to offshore investment firms and whether they were appropriately declared. He responded by threatening to sue journalists and tax lawyers as recently as last summer, when he was chancellor of the exchequer, insisting that he had paid “all due taxes”.