After the presentation of the spring budget, the satirical magazine teased Private Eye the afflicted finance minister, Rishi Sunak. Under the playful head’April fuel‘ included a photo of the minister who is filling a tank of someone else’s car for a photo opportunity. “What’s this costing me?” was his fictional question in a comic balloon. “Your premiership,” came the reply. During the corona crisis, Sunak was the hero through his generosity. Now that the lockdown bill has to be paid, his star is falling.
But it was not so much the British Indian minister who was in trouble as his Indian wife Akshata Murthy. She is the 41-year-old daughter of one of the richest Indians. The Independent revealed that she has registered with the tax authorities as a non-resident, meaning she pays taxes only in India on the dividend she receives from her 0.9 percent share in her father’s IT company. That share is worth 600 million euros, making her richer than Queen Elizabeth.
explosive
This tax evasion, once introduced for plantation owners who did not want to pay taxes in their country of origin, has lost over twenty million pounds over the past five years to the treasury her husband watches. It is tax-legal, but politically explosive: the wife of the man who raises taxes pays no tax herself. And then her father’s company, Infosys, makes millions on British government contracts.
It also comes at a time when British media reported a food bank left fresh potatoes, because poor people could not afford to cook them because of gas prices. Sunak decided to open the counterattack through an interview with The Sun† †Lay off my missus‘ read above the interview. “Don’t touch my girl.” He compared himself to Hollywood actor Will Smith who had firmly defended his wife’s honor against an ignominious attack at the Oscars.
According to Sunak, a multimillionaire in hedge funds, his wife’s tax information had been leaked to the media and Labor. The opposition party tried to take advantage. MP Jess Phillips pointed out that Al Capone had once fallen for tax evasion. Even before the scandal erupted, South London Social Democrat Peter Carpenter tweeted that Sunak, who was born and raised in England, “must return to India with his billionaire wife.”
green card
There were more leaks about Sunak. Suddenly it became known that he had been a green card has for the United States, where he studied and met Murthy. In Santa Monica, the two own a penthouse. Friends of Sunak’s anonymous friends had suggested to reporters that 10 Downing Street was behind the leak. After all, Sunak is seen as the favorite to become prime minister if Boris Johnson falls. During the lockdown crisis, Sunak had barely supported his boss.
At the end of last week, his wife announced that she would pay taxes in Britain on her Indian income, in order to save her husband’s career. The Sunday Times revealed that Murthy has exchanged the official residence at 11 Downing Street with her two children for the family home elsewhere in London.
‘I think the Minister of Finance,’ concluded a letter writer in The Daily Telegraph“begins to realize, if he hadn’t already done so, that politics is an extremely unpleasant profession.”
Patrick van IJzendoorn is a correspondent in London.