Leaked video shows UK's Rishi Sunak claiming to divert funding from poorer areas

By Karim El-Bar

LONDON (AA) - A video leaked on Friday showed Rishi Sunak, one of the final two candidates to lead the British Conservative Party, telling party members that when he was Chancellor, he had begun changing funding formulas to divert money from poorer areas.

"I managed to start changing the funding formulas, to make sure areas like this are getting the funding they deserve because we inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that," Sunak said in the footage.

The video, published by the New Statesman, a British political magazine, and recorded at an event in Kent, eastern England on July 29, caused controversy on social media.

Lisa Nandy of the main opposition center-left Labour Party said Sunak was "openly boasting that he fixed the rules to funnel taxpayers' money to prosperous Tory shires (Conservative rural areas). This is our money. It should be distributed fairly and spent where it's most needed -- not used as a bribe to Tory members."

The Conservative Party membership will soon vote to decide on their next leader, who will also become the next prime minister.

Liz Truss, who is running against Sunak, is leading in internal Conservative Party membership polls by a significant margin, though Sunak led in the first stage of the contest with Conservative members of parliament.

The new leader of the Conservative Party, and in turn prime minister, will be announced on Sept. 5, 2022.