New Delhi:
Akshata Murty, wife of incoming British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, earned Rs 126.61 crore ($15.3 million) in dividend income in 2022, with her equity stake in India’s second largest IT company, Infosys.
Ms. Murty, daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, owned 3.89 crore shares, or 0.93 percent, of Infosys at the end of September, according to the company’s filings with the exchanges.
Her holdings are worth Rs 5,956 crore (about $721 million) at Tuesday’s trading price of Rs 1,527.40 on the BSE.
Infosys paid a final dividend of Rs 16 per share for fiscal year 2021-2022 on May 31 of this year. For the current year, the company announced an interim dividend of Rs 16.5 this month, according to the company’s stock exchange filings.
The two dividends totaled Rs 32.5 per share or Rs 126.61 crore for Akshata.
Infosys is one of the top dividend paying companies in India. In 2021, it paid a total of Rs 30 per share dividend, which would have given Akshata a total of Rs 119.5 crore in that calendar year.
Sunak, 42, won the race to lead the Conservative Party on Sunday and is now poised to become Britain’s first Prime Minister of Indian descent and the 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 tax in Britain for a period of up to 15 years, has caused division in the UK.
Akshata’s non-domiciled status became a matter of debate in Britain when Sunak first entered the race to become prime minister in April this year.
At the time, her spokesperson had stated that as a citizen of India she was unable to hold citizenship of any other country and that “she always has and will continue to pay UK taxes on all her UK income.” As the controversy snowballed, she announced at the time that she would pay UK tax on all her worldwide earnings out of a “British sense of fairness”.
It is unknown how much tax she paid in the UK on the dividend income accruing to her after April – Rs 16 per share final dividend for fiscal year 2021-22 (April 2021 to March 2022), paid on May 31, 2022, and Rs 16 .5 an interim 2022-23 tax dividend to be paid on October 27.
Born in Hubballi, the hometown of her mother Sudha Murthy in northern Karnataka, Akshata was educated in Bengaluru before moving to Claremont McKenna College in California, where she graduated with a double major in economics and French.
She received a fashion design degree from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, which followed a short internship at Deloitte and Unilever.
She then continued her MBA at Stanford, where she met Rishi Sunak.
The two married in 2009. The couple, who own a huge real estate portfolio, have two children, Krishna and Anoushka.
They live in a £7 million mansion in Kensington. They also own a flat in Kensington, a mansion in Rishi’s Yorkshire constituency and a penthouse in California.
The son of a pharmacist’s mother and a doctor’s father, Sunak was educated at one of England’s most renowned schools, Winchester, and then Oxford. He spent three years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and later earned an MBA from Stanford, California, where he met his wife Akshata Murty.
According to Infosys data, the promoters own 13.11 percent of the company. The Murty family owns 3.6 percent of this (Narayana Murthy owns 0.40 percent, his wife Sudha 0.82 percent, son Rohan 1.45 percent and daughter Akshata 0.93 percent).
Other promoters include co-founder S Gopalakrishnan, Nandan M Nilekani and SD Shibulal and their families.