Sunak’s father-in-law’s company, Indian tech giant (and digital identity developer) Infosys, has been doing a roaring business with UK government departments since his son-in-law became chancellor and then PM.
The Indian tech company Infosys, co-founded by Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, N R Narayana Murthy, has seen its contracts with the UK government mushroom since Sunak became chancellor of the exchequer in 2020. Per Wikipedia, Murthy is not just one of the company’s seven co-founders; he served as its CEO for 21 years (1980-2001), its president for nine years (2002-11), and its “chief mentor” before retiring under the title “chairman emeritus”. His daughter, Akshata Murthy, who married Sunak in 2009, holds a 0.94% stake in the firm, worth some £600 million, while the Murthy family as a whole owns around 3%.
Over the past ten years, UK government contracts have earned the company some £65 million, around £47 million of which has poured in since 2020, when Sunak was appointed chancellor of the exchequer. A report by Peter Geoghegan, author of the book Democracy for Sale who runs a Substack by the same name, suggests the money flowing between Sunak’s government and his father-in-law’s company could soon accelerate:
Infosys has been listed as a supplier on a series of major public contracts that have a combined value of more than £750 million.
These ‘framework agreements’ – which have not been reported before – are by some distance the largest public contracts that Infosys has been involved with in the UK…
Infosys is one of 62 suppliers on a £562.5m contract for IT services published by the Financial Conduct Authority in October, according to the government’s Contracts Finder website.
The firm is also one of 25 suppliers on a £250m contract published by NHS Shared Business Services last month for “intelligent automation”…
These framework agreements let public bodies directly award contracts without further tendering. No awards have yet been made, but Infosys may be in line for millions in taxpayers’ money.
The contract up for grabs with the NHS is noteworthy given Infosys’ ties to Palantir, the US spyware company that recently picked up a £360 million contract to operate NHS England’s Federated Data Platform. Palantir is one of roughly 200 international companies Infosys has struck a partnership with over the years. As we reported just last week, almost three-quarters of the text of Palantir’s NHS contract, including, ironically, almost entire sections relating to patient privacy and protection of their data, has been redacted.
What Does Infosys Do?
Infosys describes itself as a “global leader in next generation digital services and consulting, enabling clients in more than 56 countries to navigate their digital transformation” powered by cloud and AI. It provides business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services. As NC reader Paul Art points out below, “Infosys was one of the earliest ‘Body Shoppers’ – a term of art in the 1980s for companies in India which shipped programmers to the USA. They also ‘in-sourced’ plenty of work from the USA and other parts of the globe leaving behind devastated armies of unemployed American and British Programmers.”
Today, Infosys is a global powerhouse with a huge roster of corporate clients and partner companies. It is not just a partner but a “strategic partner” of the World Economic Forum, which has spent decades promoting its own corporate-designed model of digital transformation globally. In 2005, Murthy himself co-chaired the WEF’s 2005 annual meeting in Davos.
Infosys has played a central role in developing and implementing India’s Aadhaar system, the world’s largest digital identity program. By 2021, the Indian government’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had issued 1.3 billion unique identity numbers (UIDs) covering roughly 92% of the country’s population. Aadhaar’s chief architect is Nandan Nilekani, another co-founder and nonexecutive chairman of Infosys, who was a few years ago lauded by Bill Gates as one of his so-called “heroes of the field” for having made the world’s “invisible people, visible.”
While celebrated and even emulated by Silicon Valley billionaires, Aadhaar has major security flaws. In early November, the system suffered its largest ever breach, resulting in the personal data of hundreds of millions of Indians being put up for sale on the dark web, for as little as $80,000. Besides the vulnerability of its data storage, India’s Aadhaar system has many other downsides, as I note in my book Scanned:
[I]t tracks users’ movements between cities, their employment status and purchasing records. It is a de facto social credit system that serves as the key entry point for accessing services in India. While the system has helped to speed and clean up India’s bureaucracy, it has also massively increased the Indian government’s surveillance powers and excluded over 100 million people from welfare programs as well as basic services.
But the system is also being extolled by prominent global technocrats, including Gates and the WEF’s President Borge Brende, as the main driver of India’s rapid economic growth in recent years. The goal is to export the model as far and wide as quickly as possibly, particularly to Africa, with the help of the World Bank and the United Nations.
Facilitating “A Bigger Infosys Presence in the UK”
Back in the UK, the Sunak government is determined to introduce its ‘One Login’ digital identity system despite broad public opposition. Coincidentally or not, it is also looking to strengthen its commercial ties with Infosys. In April last year, the UK’s Trade Minister Dominic Johnson (no relation to Boris) told senior representatives of Infosys, whose names were redacted in the government’s public records, that “he was keen to see a bigger Infosys presence in the UK and would be happy to do what he could to facilitate that.”
Johnson has his own conflict of interest. Before becoming trade minister, he ran an investment fund with fellow Tory politician Jacob Rees Mogg. That fund, Somerset Capital Management LLP, holds a significant stake in Infosys. Shortly after his meeting with the Infosys executives, the fund increased that stake by around £18m, to £105m, according to a report in the Sunday Mirror. The department for business came up with the lamest of defences: Lord Johnson, it said, had resigned from Somerset Capital before becoming a minister and “has had no contact with the business since.”
Meanwhile, the ethics adviser in parliament has ruled that Sunak is not required to declare his wife’s interest in Infosys in the register of interests. But as Geoghegan notes in an interview on the Politics JOE channel, everybody knows it’s there, and there’s a strong argument for declaring these things. After all, he said, if you were on the board of a company, “these are the kinds of things you would have to declare, not as live conflicts of interest per se but as potential conflicts of interest so that they can be managed better.”
In the interview, Geoghegan is at pains to stress nothing illegal has happened here, but “the opaqueness of how these decisions are made, the opaqueness of relations between people” is troubling. “Unfortunately, we have had a rather bad track record in this area in the past few years.”
Even more worrisome are the financial interests Infosys has in Israel, which is currently committing genocide in Gaza with the unwavering support of Sunak’s government. From Declassified UK’s November article, No Outcry Over Rishi Sunak’s Family Investments in Israel:
Until April this year, the Infosys board of directors included Uri Levine, an Israeli entrepreneur known for creating the popular Waze traffic navigation app.
Levine is a veteran of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli army cyber warfare division that spies on the country’s adversaries.
He served with Unit 8200 during a five year spell in Israel’s military in the 1980s. Levine was appointed to the Infosys board in 2020.
Infosys was already operating in Israel before hiring Levine. In 2012, it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Office of the Chief Scientist of Israel, to collaborate on research and development (R&D).
This has led some to speculate that Infosys supplies technology to Israel’s security apparatus. Declassified could not find direct evidence of this and Infosys did not respond to a request for comment…
The company’s investment in Israel deepened in 2015 when it acquired Panaya, a local tech firm, for around $200m, although Murthy was critical of the deal. Last year, Panaya hired Tal Arnon as its vice president of R&D.
As the article concludes, if Sunak’s wife and in-laws “were making money from businesses managed in part by former Russian or Chinese spies, then there might be more of an outcry.” While Infosys’ continued operations in Russia despite US-EU-UK sanctions have drawn scrutiny and criticism in the British press, its connections with Israel are unlikely to cause Sunak any problems since Israel is a British ally.
Moderna Money
Sunak’s potential conflicts of interest are not only family-related. Since becoming chancellor in 2020, he has faced allegations that he profited, or one day will profit, from the massive growth in sales, revenues and share price of Moderna. Thelene, a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund he helped set up, began investing in the US-based mRNA vaccine maker in 2011. By late 2020 it was Moderna’s largest hedge fund investor. Sunak had left the company seven years earlier to pursue a political career. For the past four years he has refused to confirm whether or not he stands to benefit personally from the huge returns Theleme has earned on its investment.
Today, 34% of Theleme’s funds, reported to be valued at $710m, are invested in Moderna, according to the Good Law Project. Sunak insists his investments are in a ‘blind trust’, which is supposed to protect politicians against conflicts of interest by preventing them from knowing what they are invested in. However, as an article in The Guardian suggested last year, blind trusts are more likely being used to blind the public rather than the beneficiary:
The list of ministers’ interests does not explicitly state whether Sunak, Cameron and the other ministers have handed over their assets to trustees, formally moving the legal ownership of the shares. There is no formal legal definition of a blind trust or exactly what constitutes a sufficiently independent third party to act as a trustee.
A Spotlight on Corruption report said blind trusts were “a tool to encourage the public perception that steps have been taken to manage conflicts of interests”.
The ambiguous disclosures leave open the possibility ministers are simply using a “blind management arrangement”, where they may have an informal agreement with their fund managers not to consult them on their present holdings or make decisions on the purchase and sale of assets. Neither system has any formal oversight.
Sunak, who is reported to be the richest ever occupant of 10 Downing Street, only released his tax details for the first time last year. Even then, they were somewhat short on detail. The documents showed that the PM pocketed nearly £5 million over the past three years, thanks mainly to dividends.
If, as seems likely, Sunak stands to profit from Theleme’s significant investments in Moderna, it calls into question not just the millions of Moderna vaccines his and the Boris Johnson government have purchased but also the £1bn, 10-year deal the UK government signed with the company in June 2022 to build the UK’s first manufacturing center for messenger RNA vaccines for COVID-19 and other diseases. For Moderna, it was an exceedingly generous offer: set up operations in the UK, conduct clinical trials there (testing its latest, experimental mRNA products) and as a sweetener, the government would throw in £1bn.
Although Boris Johnson was still prime minister at the time, it was Sunak, as chancellor, who had to sign off on the deal. And yet the British public still didn’t know whether he holds a financial stake in the firm’s biggest backer. And to all intents and purposes, they still don’t. To cap it all off, when the Covid inquiry requested access to his WhatsApp messages from his time as chancellor, he failed to hand them over, claiming he had changed his phone several times and failed to back them up.
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“In early November, the system suffered its largest ever breech…”
Breach not breech.
Their breeches got breached…
Fixed. Cheers my deers. (joke)
Thanks to Gonzalo Lira I found George Galloway.
Thank you, Nick.
Somerset and Theleme share a link. Seed capital for both, just shy of 10% to avoid triggering some financial services regulations, was provided by disgraced financier Crispin Odey.
Sunak’s role at Theleme and his previous employer, another hedge fund, was to raise funding from Indian oligarchs from India and its diaspora in Africa, the UK and North America. He’s not a stock picker or expert of any sort, hence being let go by Goldman in their periodic culls of underperformers.
The Rees-Mogg shares in Somerset are ultimately held by the Fitzwilliam Trust Corporation. FTC holds the landed interests of Rees-Mogg’s wife, a descendant of the Earls Fitzwilliam, as in the eponymous Cambridge college and Yorkshire village. Her estates are around Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham and Malton in Yorkshire, Bourne Park in Kent and the borders of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. FTC has begun evicting tenant farmers, so it can solar farms*. Government connections help with planning permission, fending off uppity tenants and other undesirables etc*.
Sunak was not the first and local choice to succeed William Hague as Tory candidate for Richmond, Yorkshire. A local was. Tory HQ imposed Sunak. The Fitzwilliam local squires exercised their seigneurial influence.
Back to the Sunak investments, please don’t expect New New Labour to do anything about these conflicts and the pillaging of the British state. Sunak is friends with Blair’s eldest son Euan and rumoured to be an investor in the Euan Blair ventures.
Tony Blair’s team is “helping” Labour write its programme for government, really a wish list for Blair’s donors. This includes much further privatisation. The Blairs are also prepping their men, Wes Streeting and Darren Jones, for the succession to Starmer. The Blair camp feels Starmer is still too cautious and lacks the freshness that Streeting and Jones bring, like Blair in the 1990s.
@ UK readers: Don’t worry about the general elections. The uniparty will win. We’re not in that club.
*The Churchills are doing the same at Blenheim, Oxfordshire. Over 10% of the 12,000 acre estate is to go under solar panels.
I should have added:
Another firm part-owned by Odey and linked to the Tory establishment is Ruffer.
One reason for the muted MSM interest is Sunak’s media links. His media adviser and best friend from school and university, James Forsyth, was at the Torygraph and Spectator and is married to Allegra Stratton, now at Bloomberg and formerly at the Grauniad, ITN and Downing Street. The Sunaks and Forsyths are godparents to each other’s children.
Thank you, Colonel, for these very helpful footnotes. It truly is a sordid, tangled web they weave at the upper reaches of the two branches of the uniparty these days.
Thank you, Nick.
I should have added that, emulating Odey, the Sunak assets may also be in trust for the benefit of the children. Odey’s investment in, at least, Ruffer is held for his son.
Odey and Ruffer employ “earls and (attractive) girls”… Their catering / entertaining matches, too.
Hullo mon colonel,
I know a few titbits about Odey as well, some of which may be news to you:
– he paid tens of thousands of pounds for a neoclassical chicken coop (this is endearing in a way and I believe was in the papers)
– he’s allegedly structured his wealth so that his children can walk into a Swiss wealth managers office and claim it all tax free
– he owns 25% of Boden (that’s Johnny Boden to him), the BoBo catalogue clothing company. Apparently held at cost in the fund accounts so clients who quit cannot extract the value
– he was heir to a business dynasty but his father vaingloriously pursued the consolidation of the British tanning industry as a blinkered response to foreign competition (and changing terms of trade) so young Crispin had him bankrupted while a student at Oxford to preserve the family fortune!
– he’s staked a number of funds along the earls and girls model.
– I may be misremembering but I think he’s quite heavily into the Alpha course and Holy Trinity Brompton. If you want to look at disturbing yarn diagrams in the UK, that is the place to start: these nutters are now everywhere from Lambeth Palace (Weby’s pilgrims dining club) to the city (Marshall Wace) and they are “seeding” churches in all the major UK cities (it’s religious entryism like the Trotskyist left: a friend’s son has been captured (girlfriend honey trap!) and his research on the movement is alarming).
He’s an all-too-human throwback compared to the bloodless types at Citadel or Bridgepoint. Clearly not safe in taxis with the fillies and a ruthless man but he’s gambled his fund on his convictions (the investment kind!) and come back from the brink several times.
His double act in meetings with his fund chairman bore a charming resemblance to a plummier version of the Two Ronnie’s, with their heavy eyeglasses, chalkstripe suits and Big Bear / Little Bear physiques….
Thank you.
I had forgotten about the chicken coop.
I had also heard about the father, but was not aware of the rest.
With regard to religion, that may also explain the ties with Ruffer.
Well, that aged badly! Tonight’s news is Odey is now being sued in five separate allegations of rape (some separate cases by the same claimant). I don’t quite understand what the civil remedy is here, damages (and for personal injury or economic loss)or just some declaration that it occurred, or why there is no criminal case.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/08/city-financier-crispin-odey-accused-of-in-new-civil-lawsuit
Thank you.
Yet another addition: Crispin Odey’s first wife was Prudence Murdoch, eldest child of Rupert and half-sister to the other children. Odey’s second wife, Nicola Pease, is a descendant of the eponymous banking family and heiress to the Barclays bank fortune.
Amazing and we here in the USA thought we had problems with our 0.1%. I am really glad to be on this side of the pond. Was watching Al Jazeera’s expose on the Labor Party purge last night. I could only watch around 30 minutes before switching it off because I was afraid my apoplectic rage might give me a stroke. So many “Supermen” on the Right while all we have on the Left are flaccid Surrender Monkey gentlemen like Corbyn and Bernie. I got my Aadhar card last year. You cannot get a phone line, internet connection, sell anything of value without your Aadhar card in India. I am not a Modi fan but he has really fought corruption which is the main hallmark of the Congress party. Aadhar makes it easier for the Government to direct deposit money into the accounts of the poorest people in India bypassing the usual middlemen who previously pocketed most of any welfare money. Has not worked much in practice though. Modi’s BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) does not believe much in welfare. Infosys was one of the earliest “Body Shoppers” – a term of art in the 1980s for companies in India which shipped programmers to the USA. They also “in-sourced” plenty of work from the USA and other parts of the globe leaving behind devastated armies of unemployed American and British Programmers. Infosys struck it rich on a product called “Finacle” a financial management application which they sold to a lot of Banks and then branched out into other areas of Software. Their story is really a middle class to riches one. All the founders of Infosys were initially middle class workers with regular jobs who were persuaded by Narayana Murthy to invest their meager savings in the company. Say what you will about the guy but he really spotted the “tide in the affairs of men” as far as the outsourcing boom was concerned and he really built the business from ground up. I remember one day in 2017 when teaching at a public University in Wisconsin when a student excitedly hailed me on the quad to say that he landed a job. “Where?” I asked him and he said, “Infosys”. I remember my utter chagrin at hearing this. For many expats from India like me the feeling is, “we left India to escape these employers and they have now followed us here to the US”. The outsourcing phenomenon has turned full circle. Today Infosys has a gleaming campus in Indianapolis and it hurts my eyes every time I drive past it to the airport. Murthy used to be a decent guy who treated his employees very well, definitely not the Jack Welch type but it seems that his values changed when the real money started rolling in. One wonders if these Titans of industry read fawning biographies of the old Robber Barons and get brainwashed. We are now officially in Utopia – for the 0.1%. It will all be downhill from here until we see the day of “the most savage form of Capitalism” a la Stalin’s Russia dawn on us when another cobbler might have a son like him either in the USA or UK.
Thanks for your edifying comment, Paul. If you don’t mind, I hoisted a small section of it into the article.
My pleasure Nick!
So many “Supermen” on the Right while all we have on the Left are flaccid Surrender Monkey gentlemen like Corbyn…
[ Jeremy Corbyn was continually attacked by the media from the time of election as Labour leader. Attacks from the BBC were extreme enough to quickly portray Corbyn in Russian dress in Moscow standing in front of a blood red Kremlin. Then, Corbyn began to be repeatedly attacked through the media as anti-Semitic. In time, the likes of Labour’s Tony Blair and Keir Starmer would manage to ruin Corbyn entirely.
Corbyn was and is entirely admirable and heroic, and should serve as a model for Labour and for UK political leadership. ]
Thanks CA. Yes definitely agree. It seems to have been a particularly well coordinated and well thought of campaign of besmirchment. What I cannot comprehend is why did Corbyn not IMMEDIATELY take charge of the party and fire all the Blairites? Very infuriating. I mean – he had a ringside seat to what Blair wrought? I was watching Corbyn on Novara media also last night and unfortunately this question was never asked. I think we really need a ruthless fighter on the Left, someone who will not hesitate to wreak wrack and ruin and leave bodies behind.
What I cannot comprehend is why did Corbyn not IMMEDIATELY take charge of the party and fire all the Blairites?
[ I understand now, and am grateful for and sympathetic to the explanation. Yes, you are correct. ]
When I watched the portrayal by Ralph Fiennes of Tony Blair in David Hare’s “Page Eight,” I could understand a fundamentally mild politician being intimidated.
You, however, would know the reality of the portrayal better.
Because he never planned on getting elected. He had been doing the same thing for decades at that point and never gotten close. But this one time Labour decided to experiment with a different election system, and boom.
The original founders of Infosys don’t have much control since they staged the coup to throw out Vishal Sikka (ex SAP) as the CEO and have been off the board. Indian and foreign institutions have much higher ownership. Murthy had a serious chance at being President of India 15 years back and made some intemperate comments making him a hot potato at that time. The actual seed money of 10K INR in 1980 to start Infosys came from his wife Sudha who was last week nominated to India’s Upper House of Parliament. Her story is even more interesting, being the first engineer in an automotive shop floor and how she got that job. The way outsourcing works anywhere is that the Big 5 vendors (Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL) will all pitch and one wins the deal. These local deals barely move the needle for each of these firms.
Indeed, and have you noticed how so many solar farms have been ‘planted’ close to junctions (so many of which are now being infested with distribution sheds) and built up areas? I assume that this is a ruse to have the land carpeted with solar panels treated as ‘developed land’, so that it can then be turned over to sprawl at the earliest opportunity, and the landowner then gains a large windfall. This could be dealt with by reviving the 1947 TCPA notion that land values be nationalised.
Other parts of the Watson Wentworth/Rockingham/Fitzwilliam inheritance included Rockingham Castle (which has profited from the northward sprawl of Corby) and Milton Hall in the Soke (where the Naylor-Laylands have profited from the westward sprawl of Peterborough). The Watson Wentworths were also linked with the Sondes of Sheldwich in Kent, and the widow of the last earl Sondes of Lees Court has profited greatly in recent years from sprawl around Ashford and Faversham (where solar panels are also now much in evidence, especially around Graveney and Goodnestone-next-Faversham).
Blenheim is a relatively small estate with a huge overhead. You may recall that they (specifically the 9th duke) were only saved by Vanderbilt money in 1895, after the 5th duke had blown most of the fortune on galloping bibliomania in the early 19th century. This is one of the reasons why the landscape between Oxford and Woodstock has been changing so rapidly in recent years, and why the palace itself is now so very commercial.
Thank you, Froghole.
Mrs Rees-Mogg and her mother, Lady Juliet de Chair, and their Naylor-Leyland cousins split the Malton estate, the former own the land to the north and the Naylor-Leyland family own the town.
The Churchills used to own Langley, near Heathrow, and Waddesdon, now owned by the Rothschilds, and had to sell in the 19th century. The family also sold the land north of Oxford, hence roads named after their subsidiary titles, Blandford and Sunderland.
We should sit down and map all these people and their assets and positions.
Indeed, Col. Smithers! They also had to sell Whiteknights (now most of southern Reading), which (along with Sandridge in Herts) was a secondary seat; the original estate was never big enough for the running costs of Blenheim, and most of the land between Oxford and Woodstock has only really been good for cattle and sheep pasture. However, since you mention Waddesdon, the Rothschilds have sold a great deal of land in the vale of Aylesbury (which, as you probably know very well, was once known as the ‘Rothschild vale’ stretching to Mentmore and Soulbury), and they have profited significantly from the sale of pretty much the whole of Fleet Marston and Quarrendon parishes, amongst other places, which are now in the process of being built out (or soon will be). Many thanks again!
Thank you.
Just back from around Soulbury and Wing, as it happens. Off to the the Cotswolds after lunch, via Waddesdon and Blenheim.
For some years, the family have begun to put their five arrows around their estate boundaries.
The Verneys have sold a lot, too, mainly for railway development.
Thank you, Colonel. It seems like that the same centuries old families still retain their power and wealth and are content to see a Sunak to be their front man and if the Tories get the boot, then Keir Stramer will be their man. from your comments over the years about all these families and their relations with each other, well, the only word that I can think of to describe it is incestuous.
Thank you and well said, Rev.
They are deep state and permanent state.
I’m glad you have chimed in as I have long wanted to bring your attention to an Aussie dimension. These families sometimes transcend the former colonial network. An Anglo-Irish-Aussie family, the Dawson-Damer clan, has British and Aussie assets, Skelton Yuill and Keswick island in Australia, held through a family trust in the Bahamas. They are associates of the Swires of the eponymous firm.
The family has never made the Sunday Times’ rich list, despite having enough to get in. They are not the only ones. These types are content to let the Sunaks get the publicity.
“global leader in next generation digital services and consulting”. So in today’s generation they stand nowhere but as they will decide what “next generation” will be, they will be “the global leader”. Could be somebody else who decide on the matter.
It is not a conflict of interest, but a case of identity between business and political interests.
Reverse colonialism. Good.
Thank you.
I don’t disagree, but caution that Blighty appears to be a Norman colony.
First class passengers on the Titanic raiding the larder and wine cellars for one last party. The problems of the Gulf Stream and the AMOC will bring the party to a close.
A problem with the Gulfstream you say? Oh, wait…
Commenting on public perception of Sunak, I think new M.P. George Galloway will be a big influence.
“Two cheeks of the same arse” and “Little Rishi Sunak” are phrases that will resonate with millions of voters.
Just a few of many such sayings that Mr Galloway will be happy to provide.
I am afraid that George’s victory will be the high point.
He will spend his short time in parliament as an example of ‘leftism’ (whatever that is these days) and the starmerites will spare no weapons in the general election to unseat him.
He will be replaced by someone ,a flunky akin to our current PM
Depends, as i hear not attached to Labour but instead has his own party.
I am afraid that George’s victory will be the high point.
He will spend his short time in parliament as an example of ‘leftism’ (whatever that is these days) and the starmerites will spare no weapons in the general election to unseat him.
He will be replaced by someone ,a flunky akin to our current PM
So? What does anyone propose to do about it?
Laws are meaningless. Enforcement is all that matters.