NEW
DELHI — Akshata Murty, the Indian wife of Britain’s
next Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak, has colossal wealth thanks to her billionaire
father — a fortune that is attracting controversy as ordinary people reel from
a cost-of-living crisis.
اضافة اعلان
Sunak’s father-in-law, N.R. Narayana Murthy, 76,
co-founded tech giant Infosys in 1981. The outsourcing behemoth, now worth
around $75 billion, helped drive India’s transformation into the “back office
of the world”.
One of only two non-Americans in Fortune magazine’s
2012 list of the “12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time”, the Infosys chief’s
life-changing moment came in 1974 when he was locked up for four nights in
communist Eastern Europe.
“That cured me from being a confused leftist to a
determined, compassionate capitalist,” Narayana said afterwards.
Sunak’s mother-in-law Sudha, meanwhile, was Tata
Motors’ first female engineer after famously complaining via a postcard to the
chairman about the firm’s stipulation that “lady candidates need not apply”.
Regarded as “India’s favorite granny”, she is a
prolific author and a powerful force in social work, setting up 60,000
libraries and building 16,000 toilets — and is reputed to be humble despite her
own immense wealth.
Doctor’s son
Sudha ensured an austere
upbringing for her children Akshata and Rohan, with no television at home and
insisting they go to school in an auto-rickshaw like their classmates.
Atypically for class-conscious
India, where arranged
marriages are still common, the couple were fine with Murty’s comparatively
humble choice of husband, a doctor’s son from Southampton named Rishi Sunak.
In a letter, Murty’s father, who spells his surname
differently to his daughter, said Sunak was “all that you had described him to
be — brilliant, handsome, and, most importantly, honest”.
The couple met at
Stanford University in the United
States when Murty was pursuing her MBA. The future prime minister was a
Fulbright scholar with a first-class degree from Oxford.
Their 2009 wedding was a relatively modest affair by
the standards of India’s well-heeled, but the reception was attended by about
1,000 guests including politicians, industrialists, and cricketers.
Rich as a queen
Murty’s stake in Infosys is
worth around $700 million, making her richer than the late
Queen Elizabeth II,
whose personal wealth was estimated at about $460 million by the 2021 Sunday
Times Rich List.
The 42-year-old has also earned tens of millions in
dividends in recent years, but her “non-domicile” status in the UK shielded
some of this income from British taxes.
To assuage some of the resulting public anger that
hurt her husband politically, Murty said in April that she would pay UK taxes
on all her worldwide income.
“I do this because I want to, not because the rules
require me to,” she tweeted. “My decision... will not change the fact that
India remains the country of my birth, citizenship, parents’ home, and place of
domicile. But I love the UK too.”
The couple, who have two daughters and a photogenic
dog, remain extremely rich and their lavish lifestyle has not gone unnoticed by
the British media at a time when ordinary people are struggling.
In August, reports said that they were spending
£400,000 (around JD320,000) on a swimming pool at their country pad. In July,
Sunak wore Prada loafers on a campaign visit to a rubble-strewn construction
site.
‘Doing good is fashionable’
Murty and Sunak own at least
four properties, including a £7 million (JD5.6 million) five-bedroom house in
Kensington, London. They also own a flat in Santa Monica, California.
She dabbled in finance and marketing before creating
her own fashion label, Akshata Designs, in 2010.
According to a 2011 Vogue profile, Murty works with
artists in remote villages to create Indian-meets-Western fusion clothes that
are “vehicles to discovering Indian culture”.
“I believe we live in a materialistic society,” she
told the magazine. “People are becoming more conscious about the world they
live in. Doing good is fashionable.”
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