London-The family of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai have become millionaires from her best-selling memoirs and speaking engagements, it was claimed Wednesday.
Four years after the teenager was shot on the bus to school in Pakistan, it can be revealed that a company set up to protect the rights to her life story has made a pre-tax profit of £1.1 million. 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 last August, 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, which was published in 2013 in Britain in a deal estimated at £2 million and has since sold at least 1.8 million copies worldwide, tells the story of her growing up in Pakistan. She explains how she was ‘hypnotised by this talk of the big world beyond our valley’, but saw 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. Against a backdrop of gunfire, she spoke out against their diktat and was shot on her way home in 2012.
But Malala survived and was airlifted to Britain for treatment, where she rose to fame after settling in the West Midlands with her family. She now 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 a whopping £114,000 per speech.
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’.
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 today: ‘Since the publication of Malala’s book, Malala and her family have donated more than $1million (£750,000) to charities, mostly for education-focused projects across the world including Pakistan.’