Rishi Sunak is to become Britain’s third prime minister of the year after evicting Johnson and letting Truss destroy herself. The mega-bucks Stanford grad is believed to have built a combined fortune, with his wife, worth around $820 million.
named them the 222nd richest people in the U.K. earlier this year, the first time a frontline politician has appeared on the list. The couple privately own four homes worth around $17 million, including a Santa Monica penthouse valued at $7.2 million.
Among his major decisions were the establishment of an unprecedented furlough scheme to avoid mass redundancies during lockdowns, followed by a subsidized dining scheme to support the decimated hospitality sector. His August 2020 “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme was later blamed for causing a significant rise in COVID infections.
Then around the same time, it emerged that Sunak’s wife exploited a special legal status to avoid paying British taxes on the millions she earns in dividends from the IT business founded by her father, in which she held an estimated $835 million stake. The opposition Labour leader accused Sunak of “breathtaking hypocrisy” for raising taxes on others as his own family apparently reduced their own liabilities.
And also in April, Sunak became the U.K.’s first sitting finance minister to be criminally sanctioned. Along with Boris Johnson, Sunak was fined for breaking lockdown rules during the Downing Street “” scandal which appalled a British public who, in some cases, had missed out on their loved ones’ final hours in order to diligently obey the government’s pandemic rules.