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…
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Nick Corbishley 