Rishi Sunak is a British citizen, his wife Akshata Murthy is an Indian citizen.
New Delhi:
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murthy earns Rs 68.17 crore in dividend income from her stake in India’s second largest IT firm Infosys.
Ms Murthy, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, held 3.89 crore shares of Infosys at the end of December, according to company filings with the stock exchanges.
Infosys declared a final dividend of Rs 17.50 per share for FY23 (April 2022 to March 2023). If she retains her stake till June 2, the record date, she will get Rs 68.17 crore.
He will get Rs 132.4 crore along with the interim dividend of Rs 16.50 per share declared in October last year.
For the last financial year, Infosys paid a total dividend of Rs 31 per share, giving it a total of Rs 120.76 crore. At Thursday’s closing price of Rs 1,388.60 per share on BSE, the value of his holding is a little over Rs 5,400 crore.
Infosys is one of the highest dividend paying companies in India.
Mr Sunak, 42, last October became Britain’s first Indian-origin prime minister and its youngest leader in modern times.
While Sunak is a British citizen, his wife Akshata is an Indian citizen. Her non-domiciled status, which allows her to earn money abroad without paying UK taxes for a period of up to 15 years, has been a divisive issue in Britain.
Akshata’s non-domiciled status became a talking point in the UK when Sunak first entered the race to become prime minister in April last year.
At the time, her spokesperson stated that as a citizen of India, she was unable to hold citizenship of any other country and “she will and will always pay UK taxes on all her UK income”.
As the controversy escalated, Akshata announced at the time that she would pay UK tax on her worldwide earnings “in the spirit of British fairness”.
It is not known how much taxes he paid in the UK on the dividend income earned.
Born in her mother Sudha Murthy’s hometown of Hubli in northern Karnataka, Akshatha did her schooling in Bangalore before attending Claremont McKenna College in California, where she graduated with a dual degree in economics and French.
She did a fashion designing diploma from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, following which she did a short stint at Deloitte and Unilever. She then went on to pursue an MBA at Stanford, where she met Rishi Sunak.
Both married in 2009. The couple, who have a huge real estate portfolio, have two children – Krishna and Anushka.
They live in a £7million townhouse in Kensington. He also has a flat in Kensington, a mansion in Sage’s Yorkshire constituency and a penthouse in California.
The son of a pharmacist mother and a doctor father, Sunak was educated at Winchester, one of the most renowned schools in England, and then at Oxford. He spent three years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and later earned his MBA from Stanford University in California, where he met his wife, Akshata Murthy.
According to Infosys filing, the promoters hold 13.11 per cent stake in the company. The Murthy family holds 3.6 per cent stake in it (Narayana Murthy 0.40 per cent, his wife Sudha 0.82 per cent, son Rohan 1.45 per cent and daughter Akshata 0.93 per cent).
Other promoters include co-founders S Gopalakrishnan, Nandan M Nilekani and SD Shibulal and their families.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)