As the daughter of a self-made tech millionaire and a no-less formidable engineer and philanthropist mother, Akshata Murty, the Indian wife of beleaguered British finance minister Rishi Sunak, is wealthier than the queen. Mr Sunak’s popularity has plummeted as a result of rising consumer costs, and recent accusations that Ms Murty’s foreign earnings are sheltered from British tax officials have added to the pressure.
Her father, NR Narayana Murthy, 75, co-founded outsourcing juggernaut Infosys in 1981, helping India’s extraordinary transformation into the “back office of the world.”
The company is currently valued approximately $100 billion and was the first Indian company to list on Wall Street, thanks to a loan of $10,000 ($130) from his wife Sudha Murthy.
Sudha Murthy, 71, became Tata Motors’ first female engineer after notably protesting to the chairman via postcard about the company’s policy of “woman candidates need not apply.”
Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murthy met while the latter was doing her MBA at Stanford University in the United States. The future chancellor of the exchequer was already a Fulbright scholar with a first-class Oxford degree when he became chancellor.
Their wedding was a small event in 2009, but the reception drew over 1,000 attendees, including politicians, business leaders, and cricketers.
According to the company’s declaration to the stock exchange, Akshata Murty, 42, owns nearly a billion dollars worth of Infosys stock. According to the 2021 Sunday Times Rich List, she is now wealthier than Queen Elizabeth II, who has a personal fortune of around 350 million pounds ($460 million).
The pair owns at least four homes, including a seven-million-pound five-bedroom property in upmarket Kensington, London, and a Santa Monica condo.
Akshata Murty is also the director of Catamaran Ventures, a venture capital firm she co-founded with Sunak in 2013.
She stated this week that she is “treated as non-domiciled for UK tax purposes,” which means that profits from her Infosys ownership are solely taxed outside the UK.
“To smear my wife to get at me is awful,” Mr Sunak told the Sun tabloid for Friday’s edition. “It would not be reasonable or fair to ask her to sever connections with her country because she happens to be married to me,” he stated. In 2010, Akshata Murty founded her own fashion company, Akshata Designs.
She collaborates with artists in rural communities to produce Indian-meets-Western fusion clothing that are “vehicles to discovering Indian culture,” according to a 2011 Vogue profile.
She told the magazine, “I believe we live in a materialistic society.”
