Akshata Murty: Who is Rishi Sunak's wife?

Rishi Sunak's wife Akshata Murty spoke warmly about the prime minister before introducing him for his speech on the last day of the Conservative Party Conference.

A businesswoman and heiress to a fortune worth billions, she has lived a life divided between three continents. Her father founded one of India's biggest companies, Infosys, while she launched her own eponymous clothing label.

BBC News spoke to some of those she has met along the way.

It is a Friday night in rural Yorkshire and local farmers and small business owners are waiting for the results of a Conservative party fundraising raffle.

At the front of the room, one of the richest women in the country and her husband are drawing paper tickets and presenting the relatively modest prizes - a bottle of Campari, a coffee shop voucher.

Akshata Murty had spent much of her life in the US and India, where her father founded one of the nation's biggest companies. But in recent years, she is just as likely to have been spotted at a local Tory social event, working the room alongside her husband Rishi Sunak in his North Yorkshire constituency.

"She mixes with everybody and everybody speaks highly of her," said Peter Walker, a local party member in Richmond. Despite her privileged background, "there is no ostentatiousness," said Mr Walker, who last saw Ms Murty joining in with a Christmas carol service.

Mr Walker, a retired deputy chief constable, said that for a long time he had been unaware of the scale of the couple's wealth. "I literally got my knowledge of their significant wealth from the news," he said.

Ms Murty's shares in Infosys, the company her father founded, are worth an estimated £700m.

Earlier this year, while her husband led the nation's financial affairs as chancellor of the exchequer, her business interests were the subject of newspaper headlines and political debate.

First, it emerged the company had continued operating in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Then, days later, it was revealed she held non-domiciled status, meaning she did not have to pay tax on earnings from outside the UK. The company later pulled out of Russia, and Ms Murty pledged to pay UK tax on all her income, but said at the time: "India remains the country of my birth, citizenship, parents' home and place of domicile."

The controversies have come as a surprise to some in India, where the family are known for promoting an austere lifestyle.

"There is so much simplicity in the way they behave and the way they live, this is in their DNA," said Suhel Seth, an Indian marketing expert who knows the family.

In 1981, a year after his only daughter's birth, software engineer NR Narayana Murthy (unlike his wife and children, he spells his name with an "h") started an IT company, using $250 dollars borrowed from his wife.

Over four decades, as personal computing and the internet changed the world, the firm morphed into an outsourcing giant. Today, more than 300,000 employees work in about 50 countries. It has won lucrative contracts to provide IT services for companies and governments around the world, including in the UK.

But it has faced controversies over its outsourcing practices. In 2013, the company paid $34m (£21m) to settle a civil lawsuit from the US government over allegations it misused visas. Infosys said at the time that claims of systemic visa fraud were "untrue and are assertions that remain unproven".

In 2019, it agreed to an $800,000 settlement with California's attorney general over allegations 500 employees had the wrong visas. Infosys denied any wrongdoing.

The company's success has made Mr Murthy one of the richest people in a country where hundreds of millions live in poverty. But he has strived not to be part of a pampered elite, his supporters say.

"He is corporate India's Mahatma Gandhi," Mr Seth said. "He is unmoved by all these trappings."

The 76-year-old is now retired, but even while leading a multinational corporation, he has said he made a point of cleaning his own toilet. It was a habit learnt from his father, who was opposed to the Indian caste system, in which the "so-called lowest class... is a set of people who clean toilets," he told the BBC in 2011. He continued the practice to set an example for his offspring, he said.

It was one of a number of steps - including not having a TV in the house - that were intended to teach the children about the "importance of simplicity and austerity", Ms Murty's father wrote in an open letter to his daughter published in 2013.

But it was her mother who shouldered the "great responsibility" of instilling family values in Ms Murty and her brother Rohan, he said.

Sudha Murty worked as an engineer in the 1980s, but gave up to teach in a college and spend more time with her children. In 1996, she started the Infosys Foundation - a non-profit organisation that funds educational and anti-poverty projects. Her passion for engineering and education is shared by her daughter.

While living in California in 2007, Ms Murty joined the board of San Francisco's Exploratorium museum, which aims to engage young people in science and technology. The foundation's director at the time, Dennis Bartels, says she had a "fervent belief" in the power of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to change lives.

She had been "especially supportive of programmes that increased the number of female engineers", he says.

He describes Ms Murty as having a "gentle and generous spirit".

As an undergraduate, she moved to the US to study economics and French at the private liberal Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles in California. She then earned a diploma at a fashion college before working at Deloitte and Unilever and studying for an MBA at Stanford University.

Her relationship with Mr Sunak began at the university's grand campus near San Francisco. The couple graduated 16 years ago, but have maintained a connection to Stanford, funding a fellowship for social entrepreneurs and keeping in touch with university staff.

"They are the same two lovely people they were as students - open and kind and humble and remarkably self-effacing," said Derrick Bolton, who was assistant dean of admissions during their time at Stanford.

In 2009, they married in a ceremony in the bride's home city of Bangalore, later hosting a wedding party in New York.

"I remember Akshata just kind of gliding through the room and how incredibly beautiful she looked," said Mr Bolton, who joined the US celebration.

"There were a lot of really important people in the room, and I'm not one of those important people, and Akshata still made time to come by and say hello and to let me know how happy they were that I had made it."

In the years after graduation, the couple built a life in Santa Monica, California, where they still own a penthouse apartment with ocean views. For two years, she worked for venture capital company Tendris, but quit in 2009 to start a fashion label, named Akshata Designs.

It was the culmination of a life-long love of fashion, which had baffled her "no-nonsense engineer" mother, Ms Murty told Vogue India in 2011. The company's website said it aimed to provide a "sustainable source of income" for female artists and craftspeople in rural India. However, the Guardian reported that the business collapsed within three years.

Around this time, Ms Murty and Mr Sunak founded a London-based offshoot of her family's investment fund, Catamaran Ventures.

Within two years, Mr Sunak was elected as the MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire, having transferred his share of the company to his wife in the weeks before the vote in May 2015. It is a solid Tory seat that used to be held by ex-Tory leader William Hague.

They bought a Grade II-listed manor house in the village of Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, which sold for £1.5m in 2015. The couple have hosted Conservative party fundraising evenings with canapes served alongside the property's lake.

It is one of four properties they are believed to own, including a four-bedroom mews house in London, where the couple have lived with their two daughters. Now, the family are set to move into 10 Downing Street.

The couple appeared on the Sunday Times' Rich List in 2022, with an estimated wealth of £730m.

It has led to questions about whether Mr Sunak is out of touch, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis, and the couple's lifestyle has regularly made headlines.

The day after her husband resigned as chancellor in July, Ms Murty delivered tea and biscuits to journalists waiting outside their London home. But her hospitality was scrutinised after Twitter users suggested the designer mugs cost more than £30 each. One wrote: "The price of that mug could feed a family for 2 days."

Speaking from Goa in India this week, Mr Seth said the episode was symbolic of what he sees as the unfair treatment of Ms Murty. "People need to evaluate her value system, and not value her wealth," he said.

He said Ms Murty was "very charming, very simple and very bright", adding that she had a "sterling academic career" before launching a fashion business "far away from IT".

"If someone has done all of this and you just paper it over by saying 'you are just a rich kid', you are denigrating academia, you are denigrating values, you are denigrating a path of simplicity that the family has treaded on all their lives."

In the towns and villages of North Yorkshire, the couple's affluence seems to receive less of a focus, even from political opponents.

Labour councillor Gerald Ramsden said that while he "completely disagrees" with Mr Sunak's politics, he admits he is "fairly well liked by the community". He pointed to the fact that he had bumped into the family shopping for a barbecue in the local Tesco this summer. "If I could afford a chef, I wouldn't be going shopping," he said.

It is a sentiment shared by independent councillor Paul Atkin. He said Mr Sunak had been "extremely helpful" on local issues, adding: "It really doesn't bother me as to his wife's position".

By their supporters, like Mr Walker, the former deputy chief constable, the couple are described as "nice, ordinary folk".

"If you've got airs and graces, they won't last long in rural North Yorkshire in a farming community like this," he said.

With additional reporting by William McClennan and BBC business reporter Natalie Sherman in New York.