This Tuesday Carlos III will commission Rishi Sunak, the first leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister of an ethnic minority, of a non-white race, the first Hindu, the youngest since the 18th century, at 42 years old, to form a government, and at the moment the richest member of Parliament. But his wife, Akshata Murty, is still much richer than him.
He inherits the position of the resigning Liz Truss, after a meteoric career that began when in 2015 he won his seat in the House of Commons. The young prime minister gets the keys to number 10 Downing Street in the middle of the Divali festival, the most important festival in India and therefore a special moment for him, after having come second in the previous internal elections to succeed Boris Johnson, which Truss won on September 6.
Sunak, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer before he resigned in July from the Johnson government, finds himself with a bitterly divided Conservative Party, an economy on the verge of recession and a Britain whose reputation has been damaged by its recent political and economic upheaval.
After a lucrative stage in the financial sector, Sunak was elected MP for Richmond, in the English county of North Yorkshire, in 2015 and began to stand out on the right wing of the Conservatives with his support for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
Thanks to this, he was appointed by Johnson Chief Secretary of the Treasury on July 24, 2019 and promoted to Minister of the Economy on February 13, 2020, replacing Sajid Javid. His resignation on July 5 precipitated the fall of his boss, which strained relations between the two.
During his time at the head of the public treasury, he was praised for his employment protection plan during the pandemic but was criticized for insufficient aid to citizens in the face of rampant inflation and a tax increase that he later partially reversed due to pressure from his colleagues.
His proposal now as head of the Executive is to raise taxes to control inflation and grow the economy with measures yet to be specified, in a return to the fiscal conservatism absent in the plan of his predecessor.
Before entering politics, Sunak held positions at several financial firms, including the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the venture capital fund The children’s investment Fund Management. In 2010 he joined another fund manager, Theleme Partners, and was a director of Catamaran Ventures, owned by his father-in-law, Indian millionaire NR Narayana Murthy.
Fined at Boris Johnson parties and scandals for paying taxes abroad
Sunak was fined for his participation in the illegal parties that Boris Johnson celebrated during the pandemic, but that is not the only scandal of the new prime minister and his wife. It came to light that Akshata Narayan Murty does not have his tax residence in the UK and that he pays his taxes in India. She acknowledged that it was true but she promised to pay taxes in this country “to relieve political pressure” on her husband. Akshata Murty until then it was not listed in the United Kingdom. With a personal fortune estimated at 730 million pounds (841 million euros), Sunak is also questioned about his ability to empathize with the most disadvantaged classes and to connect with the electorate ahead of the next general election, scheduled for 2024. It was also published that Sunak himself had benefited from the use of tax havens and was listed as a beneficiary of tax havens in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands in 2020.
Raised in the city of Southampton (South English), Rishi Sunak, of Hindu religion, is the son of Yashvir, who was a doctor, and Usha Sunak, a pharmacist, and the grandson of immigrants from the Indian region of Punjab, who came to the United Kingdom in the 1960s from East Africa.
The eldest of three brothers, he was educated at the elite private school in Winchester and, as is typical among the political class of this country, he graduated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE, in English) from the English University of Oxford.
He completed his studies with a master’s degree in Business Administration at the American University of Stanford -which he accessed with a Fulbright scholarship-, where he met his wife, mother of his two girls and daughter of the co-founder of the multinational Infosys.
Sunak, who presents himself as a dynamic politician inspired by the creativity of the American Silicon Valley, has confessed that he is addicted to Coca Cola and a super fan of Star Wars.
Akshata Murty is a billionaire, she is one of the richest women in the country, the mother of her two daughters and her well-known on the British social scene. Of Indian origin like her husband, Akshata Narayan Murty is a fashion designer who, however, has not made a career in the textile industry, but rather in business in Great Britain. They say that she is even richer than Elizabeth II.
Akshata Narayan Murty joined Dutch firm Tendris as Marketing Director in 2007, where she worked for two years, before leaving to start her own fashion firm. Two years later, in 2009, she married Rishi Sunak, whom she met at Stanford University, where they both studied.
Her clothing brand closed ten years ago but right after that she became director of the venture capital fund. Catamaran Ventures. In addition, it carries various businesses, with her husband Rishi Sunak, with whom she founded the London branch of the Indian firm owned by her father. Together they own a flat in Old Brompton Road, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in central London with royal status, and Kirby Sigston Manor, a mansion located in a small town in the county of York that is considered a National Heritage of England and that they acquired for a value of almost 2 million euros. They won’t have to move very far because one of their four London residences is on 11th Downing Street.