Malala family now millionaires, reveals report

Malala will pay £200,000 in UK tax on her earnings last year

LONDON: The family of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have become millionaires from her best-selling memoirs and speaking engagements, MailOnline stated on Wednesday.

Four years after she was shot in Pakistan, MailOnline revealed that a company set up to protect the rights to her life story has made a pre-tax profit of £1.1million.

The 18-year-old schoolgirl — who was 14 when shot in the Swat Valley after her support for girls’ education angered Taliban militants — is a joint shareholder of the company, Salarzai Ltd.

The firm, whose other joint shareholders are her father Ziauddin Yousafzai and her mother Toor Pekai, had £2.2million in the bank by August last year, reported The Times correspondent Fariha Karim. It was also claimed by Sun reporter Stephen Moyes that Malala, who became the world’s youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, will pay £200,000 in UK tax on her earnings last year.

Her book I Am Malala, published in 2013 in Britain, in a deal estimated at £2 million has since sold at least 1.8 million copies worldwide, tells the story of her growing up in Pakistan.

Malala has become a sought-after speaker since her ordeal, and a report by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC claims she is paid a whopping £114,000 per speech.

London-based Salarzai, which was set up in 2013, is a separate operation to the charitable Malala Fund which aims to help girls safely complete secondary education worldwide, reported The Times.

A spokesman for Malala told MailOnline on Wednesday: “Since the publication of Malala’s book, Malala and her family have donated more than $1 million (£750,000) to charities, mostly for education-focused projects across the world including Pakistan.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2016.