Akshata Murty’s non-dom status is totally legal – and perfectly toxic for Rishi Sunak
Rishi Sunak sounded every inch the gallant, protective husband. His wife, Akshata Murty, hadn’t asked to be in the public eye, the chancellor told the BBC plaintively, and he had found it “very upsetting” when she was targeted. Her money was her money, and the stake she held in the multibillion-pound family business Infosys – which was then still doing brisk trade in Moscow even as Sunak exhorted companies to cut ties with Russia – was strictly her affair, not his.
After all, isn’t every woman entitled to a professional life independent from her husband’s? The chancellor even wryly compared himself to the actor Will Smith, who lashed out at the comedian Chris Rock after the latter joked about his wife’s hair, as if being reportedly richer than the Queen was just Akshata’s rotten luck too.
Only now it turns out there’s another, somewhat less endearing theory for why the chancellor might be anxious to move on from the subject of her fortune, and it’s that she doesn’t pay British tax on a chunk of it. Taxes are rising for millions of Britons this month, but in the Sunak household, well, maybe not so much. For Murty has been revealed as a non-dom: she pays British taxes on any earnings in this country but not on any income overseas, a perfectly legal choice but one that could conceivably have saved the Sunak household a tidy sum. And, to be clear, it is a choice, much as her husband’s decision not to uprate benefits this month in line with unexpectedly soaring inflation was a choice.
Murty retains Indian citizenship. That’s something she has every right to do, just as Nick Clegg’s wife, Miriam, had every right to remain a proud Spanish citizen when he was in government. But tax experts argue that the chancellor’s wife could
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