Opposition parties have called on Downing Street to provide answers over Rishi Sunak’s family financial interests as the Guardian discovered that previous ministerial registers made no mention of his wife’s stake in a childcare firm, even though it began in 2019.
The prime minister could be ordered to apologise to the House of Commons if an inquiry announced on Monday into his declarations about the investment finds he breached the code of conduct for MPs.
Companies House records show Akshata Murty first took a stake in Koru Kids, one of six childcare companies that stand to benefit from a policy announcement in last month’s budget, in March 2019, when she held 20,000 shares in the firm.
While the register of ministerial interests has not been updated for nearly a year following the resignation of Boris Johnson’s adviser on interests, the six registers published since March 2019, when Murty took the stake, have no mention of it.
The first of these does not refer to Murty at all, while the five subsequent versions, the last of which was published in May 2022, says only that Sunak’s wife “owns a venture capitalist investment company, Catamaran Ventures UK Ltd”.
The records for Koru Kids show Murty owns the shares in her name, not that of the investment company. The most recent records show she still has 20,000 shares.
Downing Street has said it cannot comment while the inquiry is under way, beyond reiterating that the shareholding had been “transparently declared as a ministerial interest”.
Unlike the parallel register of MPs’ interests, not every interest declared by ministers to the relevant civil service head of their department is publicly listed, as it is up to the adviser on ministers’ interests, who is now Laurie Magnus,
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