Rishi Sunak has seen his personal family fortune fall by more than £200m over the last year.
Sunak, a former hedge fund manager and reputedly the UK’s wealthiest ever prime minister, and his heiress wife, Akshata Murty, have an estimated worth of about £529m in the latest Sunday Times rich list, a fall from £730m in 2022.
Murty owns a small stake in Infosys, a $64bn (£52bn) Indian IT firm co-founded by her billionaire father. The value of that stake has fallen, driving the drop in the couple’s fortunes.
Murty owns just under 1% of the business. The company’s shares have lost about a fifth of their value in the last year as investors have worried about the future of the Indian technology sector.
The couple first entered the Sunday Times rich list last year when Sunak was chancellor in Boris Johnson’s government, becoming the first frontline politician to be named in the annual ranking since its inception in 1989.
When asked during the Tory leadership contest in August how he could relate to the public during a cost of living crisis, given that he was richer than the queen, Sunak said people should not hold his wealth against him.
“I think in our country, we judge people not by their bank account, we judge them by their character and their actions. And yes, I’m really fortunate to be in the situation I’m in now, but I wasn’t born like this,” Sunak told a leadership hustings event in Darlington.
The No 1 spot in the 2023 rich list is occupied by Gopi Hinduja and his family, days after his brother SP Hinduja died.
The list also showed that the Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson lost £1.8bn last year, pushing him and his family down to 44th place with £4.2bn.
Robert Watts, the list’s compiler, said: “This year’s Sunday Times rich list shows a golden period for the super-rich is over. For the first time in 14 years we’ve seen the number of UK billionaires fall.
“Two years ago we raised concerns about an unsettling boom in the fortunes of the very wealthy that continued unchecked during the political instability around Brexit and the pandemic.
“This is not a crash, but there are household names who have lost vast sums over the past year. The bursting of the tech bubble, the end of rock-bottom interest rates and the jitters creeping through the banking industry have all taken their toll.
“The super-rich don’t exist in a vacuum. Many small investors lost money in some of their overblown stock market floats. Many people also work for their businesses. Financial losses for billionaires can have implications for us all.”
