- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
INDIA’s Infosys has said that it is in the process of urgently closing down its Russian operations, media reports said. Staff in Moscow are being relocated to other countries.
UK chancellor Rishi Sunak has been facing burning questions over wife Akshata Murty’s shares in Infosys, which was co-founded by her father, NR Narayana Murthy.
The firm has also come under pressure to cease its Russian operations following the invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier, Sunak’s spokesperson has said that his wife had no role in Infosys’s operational decisions.
Infosys’s most recent annual report lists Akshata Murthy as holding 0.9 per cent of the company’s shares worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
Notably, there was no exchange filing available on this development on India’s two big stock exchanges.
Infosys is one of the few IT services companies which continues to operate in Russia while most big global IT and consultancy firms such as SAP, Oracle, PwC, McKinsey, Accenture and KPMG have all closed their operations post war-like situation in Ukraine.
Recently, in a podcast, Sunak spoke about his “enormous pride and admiration” for everything his father-in-law and Infosys co-founder has achieved.
Sunak also said that his wife was unfairly attacked over her connections with the company.
In a conversation with the BBC on Thursday (31), Sunak drew a parallel between himself and American actor Will Smith whose wife was mocked at the Oscars ceremony over the weekend.
“We both had our wives attacked… At least I didn’t get up and slap anybody, which is good”, he said.
Sunak told the BBC, ”I think it’s totally fine for people to take shots at me. It’s fair game. I’m the one sitting here and that’s what I signed up for.
”It’s very upsetting and, I think, wrong for people to try and come at my wife, and you know, beyond that actually, with regard to my father-in-law, for whom I have nothing but enormous pride and admiration for everything that he’s achieved.”
