London:
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty has decided to liquidate her investment company Catamaran Ventures UK Ltd, according to official company filings at Britain’s Companies House this week.
The 43-year-old businesswoman had founded the company in 2013 with her husband as one of the directors before stepping down in 2015.
According to the latest financial statement for the year ending December 2022, available to the company on Wednesday, Ms Murty, as the sole director of the company, has now decided to exit her business as a going concern.
“During the year the directors decided to liquidate the company,” the Companies House filing said.
“Accordingly, the financial statements have been prepared on a basis other than a going concern basis and no adjustments were necessary to restore the assets to their recoverable amount or to meet the liabilities arising from that decision,” it said.
The value of the company’s investments for the period was estimated at just over GBP 3.8 million, up from just over GBP 3.5 million in 2021, and the funds owed to Murty amounted to just over than GBP 4.6 million.
Catamaran Ventures UK Ltd acted as an investment vehicle for funds from its shares in Infosys, the Indian software giant co-founded by her father NR Narayana Murthy. However, the companies it has invested in have not done so well.
According to an analysis by The Times newspaper, education startup Ms Wordsmith, backed by Catamaran, closed less than six months after receiving GBP 650,000 from the UK government’s pandemic support program called Future Fund.
The New Craftsmen, a catamaran-backed furniture company that closed in November 2022, also benefited from the fund. And Digme Fitness, a London boutique chain of which Murty was a director, failed in 2021.
Study Hall, an education technology company in which Catamaran has a stake, was awarded a government grant of GBP 349,976 through state body Innovate UK last year, prompting questions from the Opposition Labor Party benches.
Ms Murty’s investments outside Catamaran also came into the spotlight this year when it emerged she had shares in Koru Kids – one of six childcare agencies in England that could benefit from a new budget scheme announced by the Sunak-led government. It prompted a declaration of interest investigation by Britain’s parliamentary watchdog, which concluded last month that Sunak’s failure to declare his wife’s shares in Koru Kids was due to “confusion and was accordingly unintentional”.
“I apologize for these inadvertent errors and confirm acceptance of your proposed correction,” Sunak wrote in a letter to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg.
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