London: Rishi Sunak, who had become the youngest Prime Minister the UK has had in the last two centuries, is reportedly richer than King Charles III. The combined wealth that he and his wife Akshata Murthy own adds yet another feather to Sunak's cap -- who at the age of 42 is about to set records as the first UK Prime Minister of color and the first Hindu to lead the country.
Sunak's wife Akshata is the daughter of the founder of Infosys NR Narayana Murthy. Often described as the Bill Gates of India, Narayana Murthy is one of the Indian billionaires and has given his daughter Akshata a 0.91 percent stake in his company. This amounts to over 700 million pounds worth of wealth, which also presumably belongs to her husband and her two children Anoushka and Krishna.
In April this year, it emerged that Murthy was a non-domiciled UK resident, meaning she avoided UK taxes on her international earnings in return for paying an annual charge of 30,000 pounds. Without that non-dom status, she could have been liable for more than 20 million pounds of UK taxes on these windfalls, it was reported. After a public outcry, her spokesperson announced she would start paying UK taxes on her overseas earnings to relieve political pressure on her husband.
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Still, Sunak and Murty's combined fortune is estimated to be 730 million pounds -- double the estimated 300 million-350 million pounds wealth of King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort. Moreover, the Sunaks also own four properties spread across the world, all of them valued at more than 15 million pounds.
Born in Southampton in 1980 to Indian parents who had moved to the UK from east Africa, Sunak was the eldest of three children. With his father a general practitioner, and his mother running her own pharmacy, Sunak has had a financially stable background. He was educated at a private boarding school and then at Winchester College -- which amounts to an expenditure amounting roughly to 43,335 pounds a year. Sunak has reportedly in recent years made multiple donations to his school.
Sunak further went on to study politics, philosophy, and economics at the University of Oxford where he was awarded a first-class degree. He later gained an MBA at Stanford University, where he met Akshata Murthy, his future wife. The couple got married in Murthy's hometown in Bengaluru in a two-day ceremony in 2009 attended by 1,000 guests.
