LONDON: The family of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have become millionaires from her best-selling memoir and speaking engagements, a report claimed on Wednesday.
Four years after the teenager was shot on a bus headed to her school in the Swat Valley, it has been revealed that a company set up to protect the rights to her life story has made a pre-tax profit of £1.1million and Google Doodle also features Malala on International Women’s Day
Malala, who was 14 when shot by Taliban for her outspoken support for girls’ education, is a joint shareholder of the company Salarzai Ltd. Other joint shareholders are her father Ziauddin Yousafzai and her mother Toor Pekai. The firm had £2.2million in the bank by last August which was reported in The Times by correspondent Fariha Karim.
However, it is to be noted that the 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 their secondary education worldwide, reported The Times.
Further, it was also claimed by Sun reporter Stephen Moyes that Malala will pay a tax of £200,000 in UK on her earnings of last year. Her book ‘I Am Malala’, which was published in 2013 in Britain in a deal estimated at £2million, has sold at least 1.8million copies worldwide. The book tells the story of her growing up in Pakistan.
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Malala explained in her book, how she had been hypnotised by talks of a big world beyond her valley and this made her realise that her future would be limited because she was a girl – even though her father wanted her to live freely.
When she was ten, the Taliban took control of the region, forbidding girls to attend school. She spoke up against them and was shot in 2012. However, Malala survived and was taken to Britain for treatment. She is settled there now and attends the private Edgbaston High School for Girls.
Malala has become a sought-after speaker since her horrifying ordeal and a report by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC claims she is paid £114,000 per speech. “Malala is always welcome in India,” said Shiv Sena.
Just last week Malala told a crowd in London’s Trafalgar Square at a memorial to Jo Cox that the murdered MP, who was killed earlier this month in West Yorkshire, was a ‘modern day suffragette’.
