With the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Hindu is moving into Downing Street for the first time, for the first time a person of color, for the first time a man with Indian roots. But even more unusual is the First Lady and her fortune. Together they are richer than King Charles III.
Britain's new Prime Minister is a spectacular choice - he embodies multiple firsts for Britain. At 42, Rishi Sunak is not only the youngest prime minister in 240 years. He is also the richest, the first non-white Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the first Hindu to hold the office. The British media see it as "a milestone in the development of Great Britain into a multicultural and multireligious society", as the "Guardian" writes.
Migrant associations and think tanks such as British Future agree that it is "a historic moment". It says: "It shows that any office in Britain can be open to people of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds. This will fill many British Asians with pride - including many who do not share Rishi Sunak's conservative policies."
Sunak is a practicing Hindu. He has been named the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated by millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Jains around the world. The symbolism could hardly be better for him, because the festival of lights celebrates new beginnings and the triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness.
Two years ago, when Sunak was Finance Minister, he demonstratively lit candles on the threshold of 11 Downing Street to mark Diwali. "It was one of my proudest moments being able to do that on the steps of Downing Street. It was one of my proudest moments at work that I've done in the last two years," he told The Times. This will be a novelty for the kingdom, which is deeply rooted in Christian tradition, because after the parliamentary elections in 2017, Sunak swore his oath in parliament to the sacred Hindu text Bhagavad Gita.
Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980 to polyglot Indian immigrants. His father Yashvir is from Kenya and his mother Usha from Tanzania. Both families come from the Indian Punjab and emigrated from East Africa to England in the 1960s. Sunak's father worked as a family doctor, his mother as a pharmacist. Sunak distinguished himself at school and university as a lightning-fast, ambitious high-flyer. The educational path went through the best addresses such as Winchester College, Oxford, Stanford.
Sunak was already involved in the student investment club at university and made his first contacts in London's financial world. In 2001 he joined the investment bank Goldman Sachs as an analyst and in 2004 he moved to the hedge fund TCI. Sunak is said to have become a millionaire during his career as a hedge fund manager, but it was his wife who made him really rich. In 2009 he married Akshata Murthy, daughter of one of India's wealthiest men. On its "Rich List" the "Times" estimates the joint fortune of the two at 850 million euros.
In fact, Akshata Murthy is even richer. Britain's new first lady is in fact a billionaire and heir-designate with her brother Rohan Murthy to one of Asia's greatest fortunes. The British media has been reporting for months that Murthy is richer than Queen Elizabeth II.
Akshata Murthy grew up in Mumbai, India, as the daughter of tech billionaire Narayana Murthy, one of Asia's most successful entrepreneurs. "Time" magazine calls the father-in-law of the new British Prime Minister "father of the Indian IT industry", "Week" describes him as "Steve Jobs of Asia". His software and IT group "Infosys" currently has a market capitalization of 78 billion euros and employs 345,000 people. In the past three months alone, 10,000 new employees have joined. Infosys is one of the fastest growing IT service providers in the world.
Sent to the United States by her father, Akshata Murthy did her masters at Stanford University, where she met Rishi Sunak. The couple married in India in 2009 and moved to the UK four years later, just before Sunak first became an MP. Until recently Akshata Murthy paid no taxes in England as she is treated as a non-resident for UK tax purposes. Their dividend income alone amounts to tens of millions a year. This provocative fact has become a political issue for Sunak, with Murthy recently giving in to growing public pressure and announcing that he will voluntarily pay British taxes in the future.
The new prime minister and his wife live in opulent properties ranging from a four-story inner-city mansion in Kensington to a sprawling family mansion on Old Brompton Road to the Georgian country mansion in Yorkshire and the penthouse in California overlooking the beach where Baywatch was filmed.
The investment behavior of Akshata Murthy and her private investment company called "Catamaran Ventures UK" has a political dimension. For example, Murthy's firm was an early backer of dara5, a private investment community for "the next generation of global leaders" co-founded by the Qatari dynasty in 2019. Catamaran Ventures has also acquired a stake in The New Craftsmen, a British luxury furniture marketplace whose shareholders include Rupert Murdoch's eldest daughter Prudence and, in turn, Qatari investors.
But that's not all: "Catamaran Ventures" holds investments worth more than one billion euros from e-sports investments to insurance and Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. From now on, every further investment will be scrutinized politically, since political and financial power have now come together in Akshata Murthy and Rishi Sunak in an extraordinary way. In any case, they've already gotten their nickname in London: the Maharajas (Indian "ruler" or "grand prince", editor's note) of Downing Street.
