How Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty made her millions and met the future PM
Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty will pay UK tax on overseas income
Ms Murty emerged as Mr Sunak’s secret weapon at the Conservative Party Conference where she delivered a personal speech dedicated to her husband’s ambition, drive and love for Netflix shows.
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What is Akshata Murty’s net worth?
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty are Downing Street’s richest inhabitants yet. The majority of Ms Murty’s net worth comes from Infosys, her family’s tech company, which is valued at around £52billion.
The Indian heiress, 43, has owned just over 0.9 per cent of the Bangalore-based group since 2015 – a stake that was worth an estimated £690million last year, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2022.
Mr Sunak and his wife originally entered the list when Sunak was still chancellor, with an estimated combined wealth of £730 million.
But the couple is now estimated to be worth around £529million, almost a 30 percent decrease, after shares in Infosys lost nearly a quarter of their value.
How Akshata Murty met Rishi Sunak
Alongside benefiting from her father NR Narayana Murty, the PM’s wife is a savvy businesswoman in her own right.
She studied economics and French at Claremont McKenna College in California. The mother of two daughters then began working for Deloitte and Unilever and later began a Master of Business Administration at Stanford University where she met her now husband.
Ms Murty also has a diploma in clothes manufacturing from the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, a private design college in the US.
She joined a Dutch “clean technology incubator fund” in San Francisco where she worked as marketing director during 2007. But she left soon after to begin her own fashion label called Akshata Designs. The company was not successful and collapsed within three years.
A year later, in 2013, she became the director of venture capital fund Catamaran Ventures and helped to launch its London branch.
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Ms Murty is also a shareholder in at least six other companies, including Jamie Oliver’s Pizzeria, Bloom & Wild, Wendy’s restaurants in India and New & Lingwood, a men’s apparel store.
Mr Sunak’s wife’s finances at one point threatened to derail his ambitions for Prime Minister when it was revealed she had non-domiciled status.
This is an arrangement which meant she did not pay tax on earnings from outside the UK. She eventually agreed to pay UK tax on all of her income.
Mr Sunak had defended his wife’s previous non-domiciled tax status and her family’s wealth during a debate in July 2022.
The Prime Minister said he is “really proud” of his billionaire father-in-law. Mr Sunak said: “So I’ve always been a completely normal UK taxpayer, my wife is from another country so she’s treated differently, but she explained that in the spring and she resolved that issue, but there is commentary about my wife’s family’s wealth.
“So let me just address that head on, because I’m actually incredibly proud of what my parents-in-law built.
“My father-in-law came from absolutely nothing, just had a dream and a couple of hundred pounds that my mother-in-law’s savings provided him, and with that he went on to build one of the world’s largest, most respected, most successful companies that by the way employs thousands of people here in the United Kingdom.
“It’s an incredibly Conservative story, actually it’s a story that I’m really proud of and as Prime Minister, I want to ensure that we can create more stories like theirs here at home.”
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