Zarah Sultana Accused Of Delaying Transfer Of Funds To ‘Your Party’
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana take part in a discussion on Your Party, their new political party, at The World Transformed conference in Manchester, October 2025 (Credit: PA Images / Alamy)
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Exclusive: Zarah Sultana, the Independent MP for Coventry South who is a director of ‘Your Party’, is being accused of failing to transfer money to the new political party as agreed with Jeremy Corbyn and the other directors.
Sources close to Sultana have denied that she is delaying the transfer of money for any politically motivated reasons.
At least £800,000 in donations is understood to be held by MoU Operations, a company set up in April by former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, activist Andrew Feinstein and former Labour MP Beth Winter. This is money raised from the original launch of ‘Your Party’.
The ownership of MoU has been transferred to Sultana alone. The original trio tried to hand over ownership to all the Independent Alliance MPs, but they were not willing to accept it – apart from Sultana. PoliticsHome is told that the transfer was made on Wednesday, although there is a delay in this appearing on Companies House.
The plan has been to transfer all the money and data from MoU to Your Party, then wind up the company. But PoliticsHome understands that the money has not yet been transferred, despite the changed ownership.
Your Party sources have claimed that Sultana has set out demands around access to documents relating to the governance of Your Party and is using the situation as political leverage, which sources close to her denied.
Sources close to Sultana said she considers the request to be a straightforward one and believes it is unclear what grounds there are to deny her access to the documents given she is a director of Your Party.
Your Party sources have also expressed concern that, when the ownership of MoU changed, the statement from Driscoll, Feinstein and Winter said there was “a commitment to use the resources for Your Party” rather than an explicit reference to transferring the funds.
Sources close to Sultana disagreed. They have denied that the transfer is being tied to politically motivated demands and claimed instead that there has been “clear communication between Zarah, Jeremy and other relevant figures over the legal and administrative process”.
They said the transfer will be completed once due diligence has taken place to ensure good governance of Your Party, and that there is no deliberate delay on her part.
There is a split within the Independent Alliance group of MPs between Sultana and the other five original members – Corbyn, Adnan Hussain, Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed – who were elected to Parliament as Independent MPs last year.
In September, after launching a membership system without the approval of the five others, Sultana accused them of subjecting her to a “sexist boys’ club”.
She was unhappy that the group working on arranging the Your Party conference, which is set to take place on 29 to 30 November, was not gender-balanced.
Your Party sources have told PoliticsHome that they have recently discovered that the funds brought in from Sultana’s unilateral membership system launch in September amounted to almost £500,000.
This is not included in the £800,000 currently being sought for transfer, with the party having instead urged those members who joined via Sultana’s membership portal to cancel their direct debit to MoU and tell Your Party they have already paid to join.
Your Party revealed on Monday that 50,000 members had signed up to become members of the party via the Corbyn-approved system. The 20,000 who tried to join via Sultana’s system are not automatically included in this figure, as it only includes those who have proactively signed up a second time.
