UK PM Rishi Sunak is a British national, while his wife Akshata is an Indian citizen. Reuters File Photo.
New Delhi: British first lady, Akshata Murty, who not only is the wife of Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak but also the daughter of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, has earned Rs 68.17 crore in dividend income from her shareholding in India’s second-largest IT firm.
Murty, 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 shareholding till the record date, June 2, she would get Rs 68.17 crore.
Together with an interim dividend of Rs 16.50 a share declared in October last year, she would get Rs 132.4 crore. For the previous fiscal, Infosys paid a total of Rs 31 per share dividend, giving her a total of Rs 120.76 crore. Her holding is worth just over Rs 5,400 crore at Thursday’s closing price of Rs 1,388.60 per share on the BSE.
Infosys is among the best dividend-paying companies in India.
Sunak, 42, in October last year became Britain’s first prime minister of Indian origin and its youngest leader in modern times.
While Sunak is a British national, his wife Akshata is an Indian citizen. Her non-domiciled status, which allows her to earn money abroad without paying taxes in Britain for a period of up to 15 years, has been a divisive issue in the UK.
The non-domiciled status of Akshata became an issue of discussion in Britain when Sunak first entered the race to become the prime minister in April last year.
At that time, her spokesperson had stated that as a citizen of India, she was unable to hold citizenship of another country and that “she has always and will continue to pay UK taxes on all her UK income”.
As the controversy snowballed, Akshata at that time announced that she would pay UK tax on all of her worldwide earnings out of a “British sense of fairness”.
It is not known how much taxes she paid in the UK on the dividend income that accrued to her.
Born in her mother Sudha Murty’s hometown of Hubballi in northern Karnataka, Akshata did her schooling in Bengaluru, before moving to Claremont McKenna College in California, where she graduated with a dual major in economics and French.
She did a fashion designing diploma from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, which followed a short work stint at Deloitte and Unilever. She thereafter went on to pursue her MBA at Stanford where she met Rishi Sunak.
The two married in 2009. The couple, who own a vast real estate portfolio, have two children — Krishna and Anoushka.
They live in a 7-million-pound townhouse 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 mother and doctor 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 gained an MBA from Stanford in California, where he met his wife Akshata Murty.
According to Infosys filings, the promoters hold 13.11 per cent of the company. Of this, the Murthy family owns 3.6 per cent (Narayana Murthy holds 0.40 per cent stake, his wife Sudha 0.82 per cent, son Rohan 1.45 per cent and daughter Akshata 0.93 per cent).
Other promoters include co-founder S Gopalakrishnan, Nandan M Nilekani and S D Shibulal and their families.
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