UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak paid more than £1 million ($1.2 million) in UK taxes over the past three years, with his earnings from shares and capital gains easily eclipsing his political salary.
(Bloomberg) — UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak paid more than £1 million ($1.2 million) in UK taxes over the past three years, with his earnings from shares and capital gains easily eclipsing his political salary.
Sunak received almost £600,000 in investment income and £3.8 million in capital gains between 2019 and 2022, according to tax returns published Wednesday by his office. He paid £432,493 in UK taxes last year, and a total of £1,053,060 over the three-year period, after deductions due to levies paid abroad.
The prime minister’s non-political income compared to £411,000 of earnings from his salary as an MP and minister, the returns showed.
Sunak vowed in November to publish his tax returns within a year, becoming the first prime minister to do so since David Cameron in 2016. There was particular interest in his financial affairs because he is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire and is the first premier to be wealthier than the monarch.
Sunak’s investment income and capital gains relate to a US-based investment fund and the amounts are not distributed to Sunak, according to the document, prepared by the accountants Evelyn Partners.
The disclosure reveals a fraction of the household wealth for Britain’s top politician. His wife, Akshata Murty, has a fortune of more than $600 million thanks largely to her stake in Infosys Ltd, the software giant founded by her father, according to an estimate by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The revelation in April that Murty enjoyed “non-domiciled” tax status in the UK, meaning she paid no local taxes on overseas income, made her wealth a contentious topic just as a cost-of-living crisis began to bite across Britain. The furore prompted her to commit to paying UK taxes on her global income.
(Updates with single-year figure of taxes paid in second paragraph.)
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