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Akshata Murthy used her 'non-dom' status as recently as April last year, while her husband was the Chancellor



Rishi Sunak’s millionaire wife holds non-domicile status for UK tax purposes, the Treasury confirmed on Wednesday.

Akshata Murthy, the daughter of the billionaire Indian businessman Narayana Murthy, held “non-dom” tax status as recently as April last year, while her husband was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The designation allows Ms Murthy to avoid paying tax on foreign investments and overseas rental income, and to avoid inheritance tax entirely.

The revelation comes on the same day that Mr Sunak’s 1.25 percentage point National Insurance contribution took effect, increasing the tax bill of most employed people in Britain.

The tax burden currently stands at its highest point since the 1940s, prompting criticism from the Conservative back benches and the Labour Party.

Despite holding the non-dom status, Ms Murthy would have been required to choose to pay her tax on a “remittance basis” and receive the tax benefits. They are not automatic.

Sources told The Independent that the status could have saved her millions of pounds of tax on her complex business holdings, which include almost one per cent of her father’s company, Infosys, which is worth an estimated £725 million.

Dividends from that shareholding could have totalled more than £11 million over the last year, but Ms Murthy would not have paid any tax in the UK on that income, although she could have paid tax elsewhere.

A British citizen would have paid around £4.4 million on the income.

The Telegraph understands that the Treasury is aware of Ms Murthy’s tax arrangements, and that they were declared by Mr Sunak when he became a minister in 2018.

She pays taxes on her foreign income abroad.

Her spokeswoman said on Tuesday that she held non-dom status because she was an Indian citizen, and the constitution of India does not allow individuals to hold dual citizenship.

Ms Murthy will automatically become resident in the UK - and lose the status - in six years’ time, when she has lived in the UK for 15 years.

Rishi Sunak’s wife avoids UK tax as India is her ‘final resting place’



Rishi Sunak’s wife has avoided paying UK tax because she regards India as her “final resting place”, The Telegraph has learnt.

Akshata Murty, who is richer than the Queen with a personal fortune of around £725 million, pays no UK tax on her foreign earnings, thought to be around £11 million over the past year, because she claims to be non-domiciled in the UK.

She has indicated to HMRC that she has “no firm plans” to stay in Britain, even though she is married to the Chancellor, has three homes here with Mr Sunak and their two children, and runs her own British-based company.

A spokesman for Ms Murty has also refused to deny that she makes use of tax havens, after it emerged she bought shares in a company that has used a “letterbox” firm in Mauritius that enables it to reduce its tax burden.

Asked last year whether he had ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, Mr Sunak said: "No I haven't."

Meanwhile, the Chancellor himself is facing questions over why he did not declare his wife’s shareholding in the Indian tech giant Infosys, founded by her father, which has been paid almost £500 million by UK taxpayers since Mr Sunak became an MP.

Details of the Sunak family’s tax arrangements threaten to undermine his reported ambition of becoming prime minister. As well as leaving him with questions about transparency, it has shone a light on the Sunaks’ breathtaking wealth, which also includes a home in California.

Ms Murty, 41, is the daughter of Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murty, and owns almost one per cent of Infosys, the company he built and took public.

Ms Murty initially defended herself by saying she was non-domiciled because she has Indian citizenship and was not allowed under Indian law to hold dual nationality, but it became clear on Thursday that claiming non-dom status is a choice and not automatic.

HMRC’s website explains that any foreign national living in the UK can claim non-dom status as long as they have “no firm plans” to settle permanently in Britain.

A source close to Ms Murty said she considers India “her final resting place” and intends “eventually” to return if her parents need care.

Sunak under pressure over holding US green card while chancellor



Rishi Sunak’s position was under increasing threat after Boris Johnson said he was unaware the chancellor’s wife was a “non-dom” and fresh questions emerged over the couple’s tax affairs.

Sunak was on Friday forced to confirm he had a US green card– meaning he had declared himself a “permanent US resident” for tax purposes for 19 months while he was chancellor. A source close to the couple also confirmed that his wife, Akshata Murty, held a green card as well.

The disclosure appears at odds with Sunak’s defence of his wife being a non-dom – he said she intended to one day return to live in India.

The status could have helped her legally avoid an estimated £20m of UK tax on foreign earnings from her billionaire father’s Indian IT company.

The Guardian has also discovered the Treasury last week brought in a new low tax scheme that is partly designed to benefit some wealthy non-dom investors – just days before Sunak’s national insurance rise hit millions of working people at the height of a cost of living crisis.

The new laws specifically mention fund manager non-doms as a category of people who can benefit by not having to pay tax on foreign earnings through the new vehicles.

The Treasury had previously claimed Sunak had made no changes to non-dom policy since 2017, raising new questions over whether the Treasury was fully informed about Sunak’s family’s tax arrangements when formulating policy.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, called for an urgent investigation into the green card status, saying it could be a “serious breach of the ministerial code”, while Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, called for the chancellor to “come clean” over Murty’s tax affairs.

Holders of green cards are required to pay US tax on their worldwide income – and also to make a legal commitment to “make the US your permanent home”.

Davey has written to Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, and Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, demanding an urgent inquiry. His letter said: “How could the man who is responsible for UK tax policy regard any permanent residency status for the United States as acceptable? This would be a huge conflict of interest – and a serious breach of the ministerial code.”

Rishi Sunak is trying to curry sympathy from the public by pretending that somebody has launched a campaign to discredit him by linking him with the way his wife avoids paying UK tax.

He is – as in so many of his political choices – completely wrong.

Nobody needs to use his wife to discredit Sunak – they only need to look at his own decisions:

1. He vetoed a plan to save the poorest families from soaring energy bills, according to a government leak.

Three options were put forward: increasing the £200 loan payment for all households (to be paid in the autumn) to “£500 or more”, either for all households or for the poorest; delaying repayment of the £200, which the Treasury is saying must be repaid at the rate of £40 a year over the following five years; or exempting the poorest homes from the need to repay at all, turning the loan into a grant.

Sunak apparently refused to consider any of these options, which are said to have come from Kwasi Kwarteng’s Business, Innovation and Skills Department. If he really does think fellow members of the government are briefing the press against him, then Kwarteng seems a likely candidate for suspicion.

2. He blocked plans to reduce millions of energy bills by making homes more energy efficient, according to another government leak.

It seems both Downing Street and Kwarteng’s team were hoping for an expansion of the Energy Company Obligation (Eco) scheme to be included in this week’s energy security strategy, with £200 million extra per year meaning the scheme could be expanded beyond only those receiving benefits to thousands more people.

Sunak apparently rejected the ideas because he is sticking to pledges he made in autumn 2021 – even though inflation means his tax take is around two-and-a-half times what he expected to make from those proposals and he is entirely capable of doing as suggested.

3. He has benefited from his non-dom wife’s ability to avoid paying UK tax while increasing the tax burden on the rest of us to its highest level since World War 2.

As Akshata Murthy’s husband, Sunak shares his household with her and must, therefore, enjoy some of the benefits of her income. As a non-dom living in the UK, she has been able to avoid paying an estimated £2.1 million per year.

Sunak himself is said to have held a US Green Card, which allows people to live and work permanently in the United States but demands that he pay US tax on his worldwide income, until October last year – long after he became Chancellor in 2020 – meaning he may have avoided paying UK tax for the more-than-four years between that date and his joining the government in 2017.

Meanwhile, by freezing the thresholds at which people move into different tax bands, Sunak has ensured that more people are paying Income Tax at higher rates; he has also introduced a 10 per cent increase in National Insurance payments. The tax burden on UK citizens who have no choice other than to pay up is now at its highest level since the mid-1940s.

It’s a filthy record; it reads more like a charge sheet than a history of achievements.

But Rishi Rich still wants you to believe he and his wife are being smeared by malicious colleagues.

Isn’t it more accurate to say that the skeletons in his closet are coming to light at last?