Britain has moved on from judging people for being rich: Sunak

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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed he is "not bothered" by Labour's criticism of his wealthy family's tax arrangements and assumes that the UK has "moved beyond" judging people based on their money, as a new estimate predicts that the UK prime minister's fortune fell to approximately £500m.

Britain's wealthiest prime minister said he never paid attention to Labour's personal attacks on his finances. 

According to the New Sunday Times rich list, his family's wealth has plummeted by £200 million in the last year due to a drop in the value of his wife's shareholding. It wrote that Sunak, a former hedge fund manager, and his wife, Akshata Murty, had an estimated worth of about £529m, a fall from £730m in 2022.

Murty has low ownership in Infosys, a $64 billion (£52 billion) Indian information technology corporation co-founded by her millionaire father. The value of that stake has dropped, causing the couple's finances to plummet.

When reporters asked Sunak if he was worried by personal attacks on his family, such as Keir Starmer criticizing him during the prime minister's inquiries about his wife's non-dom tax status, he stated that his riches did not bother others.

Sunak has also been accused by Labour of being out of touch with regular people due to his family's wealth. One attack advert asks: “Do you think it’s right to raise taxes for working people when your family has benefited from a tax loophole? Rishi Sunak does.”

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He stated on the plane to Japan for the G7 summit, "I haven't really focused on it or seen all of it." I probably hear the bits at PMQs, but not the rest. These items don't bother me in general. I doubt that most people sitting at home are much concerned about these issues.

“What they care about is what am I doing for them to make their lives better. As I talked a lot about last summer, I think we’ve moved beyond judging people by what’s in their bank account.” He added: “These things don’t bother me.”

Murty caused a political uproar last year when it was revealed that she had avoided up to £20 million in UK tax by being non-domiciled and paying £30,000 a year to maintain the status.

With Sunak's position under threat, Murty bowed to pressure and said she would pay UK taxes on all future income, after realizing many people thought her tax arrangements were incompatible with her husband's status as chancellor. She went on to say that she admired the "British sense of fairness."

He was selected to the Sunday Times wealthy list for the first time last year when he was chancellor in Boris Johnson's cabinet, making him the first frontline politician to be named to the annual list since its creation in 1989.

When questioned during the Tory leadership election in August about how he could relate to the public-facing cost-of-living crisis, Sunak responded people should not hold his riches 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.

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