Akshata Murty earns more than combined parliamentary salaries of all labour MPs

Akshata Murty, wife of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is all set up to earn more than the combined parliamentary salaries of all labour MPs in 2023. Murty is about to receive around £6.8 million in dividend after her family-owned tech firm ‘Infosys’, declared that the shareholders would get an 18 INR or 17 pence dividend after a year of good growth. Akshata Murty currently holds shares worth over half a billion Pounds.

The new dividend takes her yearly earnings to £13.5 million as she had previously received a seven-figure dividend back in April. Compared to her yearly earnings, MPs in the English parliament earn a parliamentary salary of about £86,500, taking the combined wage bill of labour’s 197 MPs to £12.8 million, which is still almost £0.7 million less than Akshata Murty. The top rate of dividend tax which will be applicable on the dividend earned by Murty is at 39.35% which is less than the income tax in the UK.

Akshata’s wealthy came into the spotlight when Rishi Sunak first ran for the post of leader of the conservative party. Rishi was then attacked by the Labour Party through an advert. The advert, which concentrates on her non-dom tax status, asks: “Do you think it’s right to raise taxes for working people when your family benefited from a tax loophole? Rishi Sunak does.” After which, Murty renounced her non-dom status which gave her preferential treatment as it appeared that this issue would hurt Rishi’s chance of becoming party leader.

Akshata’s father Narayana Murty founded Infosys, which provides IT outsourcing services, in 1981. It has since grown to have a market cap of £59 billion, giving him a wealth of $4.4 billion (£3.6 billion) according to Forbes. Infosys today said it delivered 3.8 billion Pounds in revenues in the quarter to the end of September, up 6.7% on the previous year, while profits rose 3.2% to top £600 million.

Murty and Sunak, who married in 2009, own a string of luxury properties worth an estimated £15 million including a Pacific Ocean-facing penthouse apartment in celebrity enclave Santa Monica and a rambling Georgian manor house in North Yorkshire. In London, the couple owns two properties including a five-bedroom mews house in Kensington and pied-à-terre apartment in South Kensington’s Old Brompton Road.