Akshata Murty, the millionaire businesswoman and investor married to the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has donated her shares in the childcare company Koru Kids to charity, following concerns about whether she stood to benefit from government policies.
Representatives for Murty said she had taken the decision to exit her investment after it became “an unfair distraction for the company”, adding that she wanted it to be able to “focus on its work and growth”.
In August, parliament’s standards watchdog concluded that Sunak inadvertently breached parliament’s code of conduct by failing to properly declare his wife’s shareholding in Koru Kids, which stood to benefit from a government childcare policy announced in last Spring’s budget.
Koru Kids, which provides childcare services, was among six private childcare providers involved in a pilot scheme proposed in the budget to incentivise people to become childminders.
Daniel Greenberg, parliament’s commissioner for standards, said Sunak should have declared the shareholding when being questioned on the policy by the liaison committee of senior crossbench MPs on 28 March.
Asked if he had anything to declare in relation to the scheme, he replied: “No, all my disclosures are declared in the normal way.”
It later emerged that bosses from the company attended a Downing Street reception hours after Sunak’s appearance before the committee.
Sunak then sent a letter to the committee saying he had answered the question in his capacity as prime minister, and his interest in Koru Kids had been “rightly declared” in the register for ministers. While the separate register of MPs’ interests is updated every fortnight, the register for ministers, supposedly published twice a year, had not appeared for nearly 12 months at the time.
The investigation came after the Guardian discovered that the six registers published since March 2019, when Murty took a stake in the company, had no mention of it.
Rachel Carrell, the CEO and founder of Koru Kids, said Murty had been one of the company’s first investors but “the media attention surrounding this investment” was obscuring its push “for greater investment and to improve access to wraparound care for families”.
She added: “We need to ensure that school-age children are not left behind in any new plans that materialise from the government’s levelling up plans for childcare, without any distractions for our business.”
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Last September, Murty wound down her startup investment fund, months after questions were raised over its links to taxpayer-funded schemes. Murty’s venture capital fund, Catamaran Ventures UK, said its directors “have decided to liquidate the company”, according to filings at Companies House.
Murty had used Catamaran Ventures UK to invest some of the vast wealth she derives from her 0.91% stake in her father’s Indian IT business, Infosys. In 2023 her holding was worth about £590m.
Murty’s shares in Koru Kids were donated to the charity ShareGift in December 2023, and the company said the change would be put on the public record in due course.