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.
Sunak, once seen as a future prime minister, has seen his popularity sink because of surging consumer prices, while recent reports that Murty’s foreign earnings are shielded from British tax authorities have added to the pressure.
Her father, N.R. Narayana Murthy, 75, co-founded tech giant Infosys in 1981, the outsourcing behemoth that helped drive India’s remarkable 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 rupees ($130) from his wife Sudha.
The Infosys CEO’s life-changing incident occurred in 1974, when he was imprisoned for four nights in communist eastern Europe. He was one of only two non-Americans on Fortune magazine’s 2012 ranking of the “12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time.”
“That cured me from being a confused leftist to a determined compassionate capitalist,” Narayana, now worth more than $4 billion, said afterwards.
She also gave her children Akshata and Rohan an austere upbringing, refusing to allow them to watch television at home and insisting that they ride in an auto-rickshaw to school like their classmates.
Unusually in class-conscious India, where arranged weddings are still frequent, Akshata’s parents were satisfied with her modest choice of spouse, a family doctor’s son from Southampton, England.
She also gave her children Akshata and Rohan an austere upbringing, refusing to allow them to watch television at home and insisting that they ride in an auto-rickshaw to school like their classmates.
Unusually in class-conscious India, where arranged weddings are still frequent, Akshata’s parents were satisfied with her modest choice of spouse, a family doctor’s son from Southampton, England.
In a letter to Akshata published in an anthology, her father said he found Sunak “to be all that you had described him to be – brilliant, handsome, and, most importantly, honest”.
“I understood why you let your heart be stolen. It was then that I reconciled to sharing your affections with him,” he wrote.
The couple met at Stanford University in the United States when Akshata was pursuing her MBA. The future chancellor of the exchequer was a Fulbright scholar already with a first-class Oxford degree.
Their 2009 wedding was a relatively modest affair, but the reception was attended by about 1,000 guests including politicians, industrialists and cricketers.
Akshata, 42, owns shares worth almost a billion dollars in Infosys, according to the company’s disclosure to the stock exchange.
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 ($460 million).
At least four homes are owned by the couple, including a £7 million five-bedroom property in upmarket Kensington, London, and a condo in Santa Monica, California.
Akshata is also the director of venture capital company Catamaran Ventures that she founded with Sunak in 2013.
She confirmed this week that she “is treated as non-domiciled for UK tax purposes”, meaning returns from her Infosys stake are only liable for taxation outside Britain.
Sunak told the Sun newspaper for Friday’s edition that “to smear my wife to get at me is awful”.
He said “it would not be reasonable or fair to ask her to sever ties with her country because she happens to be married to me”.
Akshata created her own fashion label, Akshata Designs, in 2010.
According to a 2011 Vogue profile, she 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.”
As an independent media platform, we do not take advertisements from governments and corporate houses. It is you, our readers, who have supported us on our journey to do honest and unbiased journalism. Please contribute, so that we can continue to do the same in future.
