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Akshata Murthy at the UK Conservative Party Leadership Conference in August 2022.
Akshata Murthy, wife of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is the daughter of an Indian billionaire. She lived on three continents and the BBC spoke to some people she knew.
Farmers and shopkeepers in suburban Yorkshire gathered on Friday evening to await the results of the Conservative Party lottery.
Ahead, Akshata Murthy, a wealthy lady, and her husband pulled out tickets and handed out relatively mundane prizes: a bottle of Campari and a cash voucher for a coffee shop.
Murthy spent most of his time in the United States and India, where his father founded one of the largest tech companies in the country, Infosys. But in recent years she has made occasional appearances at Conservative Party events to support her husband Sunak’s work in North Yorkshire constituency.
“Unpretentious” rich girl.
Peter Walker, a Conservative in the local Richmond constituency, said the last time he saw Murthy was at a “Christmas Buzzard” event, saying that despite Murthy’s superior background, “he didn’t. Zhang Yang “,” was in harmony with everyone, and everyone was full of praise for her. “
Walker, a retired deputy sheriff, said he hadn’t known the size of the couple’s wealth for a long time: “I really read the news to see how rich they were.”
Murthy’s £ 700 million stake in Infosys was the subject of headlines and political debate when her husband took over as chancellor a few months ago.
It turned out that Infosys continued to operate in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. In the following days, it was revealed that he had “non-dom” status and did not pay taxes on his income abroad in the UK. Infosys has since withdrawn from Russia and Murthy has pledged to pay British taxes on all of its income.
The “simple life” of a rich family
The controversies came as a surprise to some in India, as the Murthy family has a reputation for simplicity.
“Their behavior and way of life are very simple, it’s in their DNA,” said Suhel Seth, an Indian marketing expert who knows the family.
Murthy’s father, Narayana Murthy, is a software engineer. In 1981, when his daughter was one year old, he borrowed $ 250 from his wife to start a technology company called Infosys.
In four decades, the company has evolved into a software outsourcing giant with the pervasiveness of computers and the Internet and today employs more than 300,000 people in 50 countries, providing IT services to businesses and governments around the world, including The UK.
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In 2010, Murthy’s father, Narayana Murthy, met with former British Prime Minister David Cameron at Infosys office in Bangalore.
However, the “Infosys” company has also caused controversy due to its outsourcing practices. In 2013, the company paid $ 34 million (£ 21 million) to settle a civil lawsuit from the US government, claiming it was abusing visas. The company claimed at the time that claims of systemic visa fraud were “false and unfounded claims”.
In 2019, the company reached a $ 800,000 settlement with the California Attorney General over allegations that 500 employees had incorrect visas. Infosys denies any wrongdoing.
With Infosys, Murthy is one of the richest men in India, where hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty, and his supporters claim that Murthy has struggled not to become spoiled in the elite class.
“He was the Mahatma Gandhi of Indian business and he was unmoved by all these externalities,” said Sohail Seth, an Indian marketing expert.
Mr. Murthy, 76, has since retired but has insisted on cleaning the bathrooms himself. He told the BBC in 2011 that it was a habit he had learned from his father, who opposed the Indian caste system, according to which “the so-called lower class … is a bunch of scavengers”. He said he insisted on cleaning the toilet himself to set a good example for future generations.
To teach his children “the importance of simplicity and frugality”, Mr. Murthy deliberately avoided installing a television in his home. This is what he mentioned in an open letter to his daughter in 2013.
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Murty was also deeply influenced by her mother, Sudha Murty (left). And to make the children understand “the importance of simplicity and frugality”, even Mr. Murthy did not deliberately install televisions in the house.
The influence of an engineer mother
Murty was also heavily influenced by her mother, Sudha Murty. Her mother, an engineer in the 1980s, gave up teaching at university to accompany her children and in 1996 she founded the “Infosys” Foundation, a non-profit organization that funds education and fight against poverty.
Murthy’s mother’s passion for engineering and education inspired Murthy, who joined the board of the San Francisco Exploratorium in 2007 while living in California, USA, which promotes youth participation in science and to technology.
Dennis Bartels, executive director of the museum, said Murthy has a “fanatical belief” that Stem (science, technology, engineering, math) can change people’s lives, adding that she was “particularly in favor of projects that increase women engineers “, but also with” a kind and generous spirit “.
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Akshatta-Murthy and Sunak with their daughters Krishna and Anushka.
Meet Sunak
Murthy graduated from Los Angeles, California, and attended Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts college, where he studied economics and French. He went on to earn a diploma from a fashion school, then worked at Deloitte and Unilever and earned an MBA from Stanford University.
She and Sunak met on the Stanford campus, 16 years after graduation, still in contact with the school’s faculty and funding social entrepreneurship research.
Derrick Bolton, their assistant director of admissions at Stanford, said, “They are just as good people as they were as students: open-minded, kind, humble and very discreet.”
In 2009, the two got married in Murthy’s hometown of Bangalore, India, and later held a wedding party in New York. Bolton, who attended the American show, recalled that Murthy was very beautiful: “There were a lot of very important people there, and I wasn’t one of those important people, and she still took the time to come and say hello and say she’s glad I’m here. “
In the years following graduation, the couple lived in Santa Monica, California with an oceanfront penthouse. For two years, Murthy worked at venture capital firm Tendris before stepping down in 2009 to start a fashion brand called “Akshata Designs”.
She told Vogue India in 2011 that it was the pinnacle of her lifelong love of fashion, much to the confusion of her “serious engineer” mother.
The company’s website states that the brand aims to provide a “sustainable source of income” for female artists and craftsmen in rural India. Unfortunately, the company went out of business within three years, according to The Guardian.
Living above ground?
Around this time, Murthy and Sunak launched a branch of his family’s investment fund, venture capital firm Catamaran Ventures, in London.
Within two years, Sunak was elected to the constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire, a solid Conservative seat previously held by former Conservative leader William Hague. Sunak transferred his company’s shares to his wife weeks before the May 2015 vote.
The couple bought a Grade II listed manor house for £ 1.5 million in Kirby Sigston (Kirby Sigston) outside the town of Northallerton, where they hosted a Conservative Party fundraising party and provided riverside snacks. lake of the manor.
It is reported that it is one of four properties under their name and that they also own a four-bedroom ‘stable’ in London, where they lived with their two daughters. Now the family will move to 10 Downing Street.
The couple is said to have a £ 730m fortune on the Sunday Times Rich List of 2022. This has raised questions about Sunak’s departure, especially during a cost of living crisis where the couple’s lifestyle has often been in the news.
The day after Sunak’s resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer in July, a large number of media outlets were waiting at the door of his London home. Murthy served tea and biscuits to the reporters in attendance. His hospitality was tested on Twitter, and some netizens were reviewed. She was criticized for holding cups worth over £ 30 each, which “could feed a family for two days”.
In this regard, Indian marketing expert Sohail Seth believes this incident reflects Murthy’s unfair treatment. “People have to value his values, not his wealth,” she said.
He said Murthy was “very charming, very innocent, very intelligent”, adding that he had a “great academic career” before developing a fashion brand “away from the IT world”. “If someone does all this and you deny it with ‘you’re just a rich kid’, you are denigrating the academic world, denigrating values, denigrating the simple path that this family has followed all their life”.
What do the residents of the college think?
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Now the family will move to 10 Downing Street.
In the towns and suburbs of North Yorkshire, the couple’s wealth appears to have received little attention, even from political rivals.
Labor MP Gerald Ramsden said that while “he does not completely agree” with Sunak’s political views, he admitted that he was “quite popular in the community”. Ramsden said, meeting the Sunak family at a local Tesco supermarket this summer to purchase barbecue supplies, “if I could afford a chef, I wouldn’t buy it myself.”
Independent MP Paul Atkin thought the same way. He said Sunak had been “very enthusiastic” about regional issues, adding, “I’m not really bothered by his wife’s situation.”
For Sunak’s supporters, many have described him as a “good common man”. For example, retired Deputy Sheriff Walker said, “If you go on the air, you can’t last too long in a farming community like the North Yorkshire suburbs.”
