Rishi Sunak’s wife is NOT elected OR in a public role but she is a woman

[BigGreenSpacehopper]

Have you noticed that Zac Goldsmith (elected), Mark Carney (role of significance to all of us as Govenor of the Bank of England), 4th Viscount Rothmere (controlling shareholder and Chair of the Daily Mail) all have non Dom status but no mention is really made. However, a woman, who has no public role, has never said anything public, is being criticised for her non Dom status?

And yes she’s getting massive dividends but I imagine as it’s family money there is a massive pre-nup in place so it’s not like Rishi will be able to run off with it!

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

I also question her non dom status. Is the UK really only a temporary residence and not her “natural home”? If so we have a Chancellor making far reaching decisions for country that he plans to leave permanently in a relatively short time. That’s pretty relevant information to the electorate.

Yes, Sunak has got himself between a rock and a hard place with this particular argument.

The fact that Sunak’s wife is married and has a family here but claims she will not live her permanently because of her parents just stinks.

Am I missing something? Isn't tax liability calculated on an annual basis? Therefore, wouldn't she (morally if not compulsorily) pay UK tax for the years that she is resident in the UK and then, if she later decides to return to live full-time in India, her tax liability to the UK would have ended from that financial year?

Also, if she does return to live in India to be with her parents when they are very elderly, what will happen if she decides to return to the UK once.... the usual thing that eventually happens to very elderly people has happened? She could spend many years in the UK (already has, by the sound of it), then maybe two or three years in India, and then several more decades in the UK - and yet India is still supposedly her permanent 'home'?

@thewhatsit

That would be an option yes, and a smaller % increase would be needed I thought VAT was generally considered a regressive tax? I know the “sin” taxes are certainly extremely regressive - although probably needed.

Yes exactly, that’s why I questioned it.

@HardyBuckette

The financial affairs of the Chancellor's spouse are of clear public interest. Trying to downplay that simply looks ridiculous.

Yes. It’s ridiculous to downplay the fact that it’s part of the chancellor’s household income.

I wonder if it's those who spend most on luxuries who have decreed VAT regressive?

Zac Goldsmith isn't elected. But yes, as a member of the House of Lords and in government he certainly shouldn't be claiming non Dom status

Whilst I don’t know where she pays tax- if anywhere! I doubt it’s in India - as when asked this exact direct question a spokesperson said ‘she pays ‘international tax’ — I’m pretty sure if it was in India they would have said so, as thats slightly easier to justify. I would be happy to bet £100 it’s in Cayman isles, Bahamas etc — somewhere with not much scrutiny and low tax.

Whereas increasing NI and having the poor pay disproportionately? That's progress.

tbh thinking about it i really don't care about the financial aspect - she is doing what most rich people do and reducing the amount of lovely money she has to give away. Jacob Rees-Mogg being an excellent case in point.

The EU are (maybe they did already, i am not super wealthy so i don't follow these things closely) bringing in rules about who can claim non-dom status and when and it was one of the drivers of the Russian money behind the leave campaign to get the UK out of Brexit so they could still benefit from that. Possibly.

I'm not entirely sure about his blind trust - since he knows, presumably where his investments are. He definitely knows that the rules he is not repealing are benefitting him, his wife and the other fabulously wealthy people at the expense of the poorest in society. So the moral question of this whole thing is way more interesting to me. The ethics of it are sketchy.

FWIW the tories chased and chased him to get him to stand as an MP and a lot of people at the time he was first elected wondered why he, a seriously wealthy individual, would do that. Well, it seems pretty clear now, no?

i will be very interested to hear where these stories really came from. My guess is someone who is making out they support Johnson but is waiting to swoop in once all the credible competition is elminiated. Truss maybe?

And in Rishi's shoes? people say he should resign. If i were him I'd shaft everyone a whole lot more before i did, because I'm petty.

Finally: the UK should have insisted that any furlough money paid to companies was repaid before dividends were paid out. Of course, then most companies would just have fired everyone during the first lockdown. So, swings and roundabouts.

Why should she only have to pay £30,000 a year on over £10m in dividends income

It really is ridiculous when you think about it in these terms.

My husband and I are self employed. We are pretty average in terms of take home income and we paid £24k in self assessment tax in January just gone (between us). We fortunately did well during Covid but it was a constant up hill struggle. One we are still fighting now.

How I wish we could have paid a mere 6k more for £10m in dividends! We'd be laughing. Which is much the point.

If this was the husband of a female Chancellor, I suspect, OP, you would be complaining that we wouldn't criticise a male Chancellor for the same thing.

The simple fact is that we should obviously hold women to the same standards as men. It is pretty hypocritical to claim non dom status and all the advantages that go with it whilst living in a house paid for by the taxpayer, with a husband also paid rather a lot by the taxpayer, having the benefits of security guards paid for by the taxpayer, etc, etc, etc.

In this case the target is in any event Sunak himself, and indeed Johnson, as both should have had a good hard think about the optics of all this a long time ago, particularly when taking decisions around cutting benefits, taking away restraints on field prices, and failing to fund the NHS, social care and education systems adequately.

I wonder how much tax she pays to India. Would it be less than she would pay iin the UK. Isn't India a poor country which claims international aid.

No one complained when he was making £200bn available for furlough. No it didn’t go far enough as the £20 uplift was being removed, and it was it wasn’t going on for long enough and, and, and…. All this hand wringing now it’s got to be paid back and all decisions he made are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’.

She isn’t elected. She doesn’t sit anywhere.

Dividend tax has also gone up - by 1.25%. It’s mainly so people don’t use businesses to escape the NI route but it effects all dividends equally - including investment income.

And he is unethical because her family has money? What does he do - divorce her?

That strikes me as absurd as someone saying don’t have children you can’t afford as the response can be - I can’t push them back in…

He declared it. The business isn’t even here and we have no idea what tax is or isn’t paid elsewhere.

The problem we have here is that cabinet position are gifts from the PM. In America you have to show why should do a job

@JaniieJones

I'm not sure what folk are so riled about. She pays tax in this country on her uk income, she pays tax in India on her income there.

The fact they are rich is irrelevant, I can understand people are jealous but it all reeks of racism and misogyny and the fact is it's all legal.

Sunak has had to make tough financial decisions because we've just paid lots of people's wages in furlough for 2yrs. It's got to be repaid somehow. Do we think Mrs Sunak is responsible for the costs of the pandemic?

She's not evading tax. She's not avoiding tax. She's an Indian national paying tax in India. A country that we consider worthy of foreign aid payments.

So Sunak is wealthy? Personally, that's pretty much a requirement to become Chancellor. It's a ridiculously hard job that 99.9% couldn't actually do. No one wants to pay tax but they want the spending to go up and up and up. It's such a balancing act. It's usually why governments fail.

I'd also point out that for all Labour's noise on the issue, they've been more than happy for the non dom rules to exist throughout all of their periods in Government.

I also can't help but feel that if the roles were reversed, they'd be screaming that the "racist" Tories were targeting an Asian woman.

As Chancellor Rishi Sunak could have addressed non-dom status. It was a Labour election pledge. He chose not to. Why?

Whether or not there is a pre-nup in place preventing this already extremely rich man running off with any of his wife's money in the event of a divorce, in the meantime the family benefits in almost unimaginable ways as do their children who always will.

He has chosen to cast ordinary citizens and their children into poverty while keeping quiet about his wife's tax status - fuck knows why anyone ever thought he was clever. It was always bound to come out.

Now they are trying to play the poor little woman card and it appears some people are falling for it.

Sometimes it's not all about misogyny. Akshata Murty is not a poor woman by any measure of the word. Her husband will fail in his dream of replacing Boris Johnson but they'll be all right. It's the rest of us who will suffer.

I can't work out why everyone is saying "meh you misogynists she is in charge of her own money nothing to do with him"

And yet for so many things, UC etc, household income is what counts. Do you have so much to say about that too? is it right? have you campaigned against it? challenged your local political candidates? It cannot be one rule for them and one for everyone else.

I can't work out why everyone is saying "meh you misogynists she is in charge of her own money nothing to do with him"

That isn't what I meant. I was referring to the fact that everyone, media, here etc, refers to her as "Sunak's wife" - she has a name. It isn't Mrs Sunak. I find it odd, depressing.

But that's quite apart from the reason she is being mentioned at all!

@Silverclocks

I also question her non dom status. Is the UK really only a temporary residence and not her “natural home”? If so we have a Chancellor making far reaching decisions for country that he plans to leave permanently in a relatively short time. That’s pretty relevant information to the electorate.

Yes, Sunak has got himself between a rock and a hard place with this particular argument.

Considering he wasn't even an MP until 2015 and he has somehow become probably the most senior/important minister besides the MP in just 5 years, there's clearly someone pulling the strings in the background and he'll disappear from politics pretty quickly once "he's done his job" whatever that is. He'll certainly not hang around as an MP once he's no longer a Minister and will move on to other money making roles. We really do seem to struggle with short term MPs/Ministers who are clearly in it for themselves rather than the people who elect them!

As for camapaigning, yes, I do. As part of the work I do for a local food bank etc. I am politically active, lower case 'p'

@JassyRadlett

And frankly, no one was even slightly interested until Infosys decided to keep operating in Russia after the invasion (now reversed that decision) and she decided to defend it/keep her shareholding - thus tacitly supporting the decision.

At the time a lot of businesses were taking a financial hit to get out of Russia, and ordinary people were paying (and will pay) huge amounts due to the costs of the war particularly on oil and gas prices.

She wasn't the only rich person to be criticised for not divesting from Russian-linked investments or operations.

And the statement she put out was just such total bullshit, it's massively inflamed the situation by conflating tax residency with citizenship. If she hadn't lied, she'd be in less trouble now.

This in spades.

@Brefugee

Finally: the UK should have insisted that any furlough money paid to companies was repaid before dividends were paid out.

Companies had to pass on the furlough money to the employees, so if anyone should be repaying money, it's the employees who benefitted not the employer! In fact, furlough didn't even cover the costs of the employer, i.e. didn't cover employers NIC, holiday pay, employers pension contributions, etc.

People are saying Sunak's wife because that's the context of the issue.
Akshata Murty, rich Indian non-dom woman? She's obeying the law.
Mrs Sunak, rich Indian non-dom wife of the Chancellor who's hiking tax and doing nothing to help people who are the poorest? Leaves a bad taste.

@FreddyVoorhees

She lives here, she should pay tax here. Really rather simple. The non-dom status has been a problem for a long time and has regularly risen to the surface from time to time in the public consciousness when people are reminded that our tax rules allow rich people to pay a fee to claim they don't really want to stay here permanently so should be able to avoid millions in tax. We have no idea what her tax affairs are in India and shouldn't have to care because she should be paying tax here.

The behaviour and affairs of the spouse of a senior government minister are in the public interest, Mr Sunak and his wife both know this.

Personal wealth is not a requirement to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and has no bearing on how well one performs the role. Claiming that it is is bizzare and still no justification for the state of affairs.

What Labour did it didn't do in power is no justification for why the non-dom status should exist in our tax code nor why individuals who are clearly fully resident here with obvious evidence of their domicile (family ties, children educated here, etc) are allowed to pretend they are not for years on end to avoid tax.

So this freebie for the wealthy needs to be removed and if the Chancellor's wife is the agent for that change then so be it.

He benefits from her non dom status in the same way someone on universal credit benefits when a partner moves in.

Either we look at partners incomes or we don’t