Spotlight on Sunak’s family as they prepare to enter No 10
The spotlight is on the family preparing to move into No 10 as Rishi Sunak is poised to take up residence along with his wealthy wife and their two daughters.
Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had moved to the UK from east Africa. His father was a GP and his mother ran her own pharmacy. The eldest of three children, Sunak was educated at a private boarding school, Winchester College, and went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, where he was awarded a first-class degree.
He later gained a master’s of business administration (MBA) at Stanford University, where he met Akshata Murty, his future wife.
Murty, 42, is the daughter of the Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murthy, often described as the Bill Gates of India, who founded the software company Infosys. According to reports, his daughter has a 0.91% stake in the company, worth about £700m.
She studied economics and French at the private Claremont McKenna College in California, then earned a diploma at a fashion college before working at Deloitte and Unilever and studying for an MBA at Stanford.
The couple married in her home town of Bengaluru in a two-day ceremony in 2009 attended by 1,000 guests. Their two children, Krishna and Anoushka, appeared with Sunak on the campaign trail in the leadership contest against Liz Truss during the summer.
Murty runs her own fashion label, Akshata Designs, and is also the director of a venture capital firm founded by her father in 2010. She is listed on LinkedIn as director of the capital and private equity firm Catamaran Ventures, the gym chain Digme Fitness and the gentlemen’s outfitters New & Lingwood.
In April it was revealed that Murty was a non-domiciled UK resident, meaning she avoided UK taxes on her international earnings in return for paying an annual charge of £30,000.
Without that non-dom status she could have been liable for more than £20m of UK taxes on these windfalls, it was reported. After a public outcry, her spokesperson announced she would start paying UK taxes on her overseas earnings to relieve political pressure on her husband.
- Agencies
