Rishi Sunak’s controversial fund to support startups during the Covid pandemic invested nearly £2m in companies linked to his wife, Guardian analysis has found.
Carousel Ventures, a company part-owned by Akshata Murty’s venture capital firm, got an investment of £250,000 from the Future Fund to help fund its ownership of a luxury underwear business called Heist Studios, it can be disclosed.
It is the fourth business linked to Murty revealed to have received an investment from the fund set up by Sunak to support startups when he was chancellor during the Covid pandemic.
None of Murty’s investments that benefited from the Future Fund appear publicly on Sunak’s register of ministerial interests. Critics have raised concerns over a lack of transparency and the potential for a perceived conflict of interest given Sunak launched the scheme to help startups – a sector in which his wife is a known investor.
Other investors in Carousel Ventures via an intermediary fund include Andrew Griffith, a Conservative MP who is now a Treasury minister under Sunak, and Brent Hoberman, a businessman who publicly pleaded with Sunak to bring in such a scheme and “save our startups”.
The £250,000 loan to Carousel Ventures has now been converted into equity, so the UK taxpayer owns a small stake in the “revolutionary shapewear” company.
As well as Carousel Ventures, Murty also had shareholdings in New Craftsmen, which received a £250,000 Future Fund loan; Mrs Wordsmith, which got £1.3m from the fund; and Digme Fitness, which received an unknown amount over £125,000, according to the terms of the fund. All three businesses went into administration.
In May 2020, Sunak launched the Future Fund to help emerging businesses during the pandemic but it has since been heavily criticised.
A former non-executive director at the British Business Bank said in an audit committee meeting in 2021 that many of the Future Fund companies would have a limited chance of sufficient growth and would therefore become “zombie businesses” – able to service their debt but not repay the original amount without raising further capital.
When the scheme was launched, the most senior civil servant in the business department required a ministerial direction – an instruction from ministers – to set it up because it was not possible to determine that it would be value for money.
Shortly after the launch, the British Business Bank chief executive, Keith Morgan, wrote a “reservation notice” to ministers warning of concerns that the scheme would mostly attract “second-tier” companies that could not attract investment from elsewhere and that achieving value for money for the taxpayer was “highly uncertain”.
About 130 of the 1,191 firms given funding have ceased trading within the past three years.
The scheme allowed any eligible company to access funding if they had match funding from investors and passed required checks, so neither ministers nor the British Business Bank had a role in selecting which firms got money.
No 10 and Sunak have always argued that Murty has a right to privacy over her investments and that the prime minister has received official advice that he does not need to declare them.
The ministerial register declares that Murty owns Catamaran Ventures and is a venture capital investor with a number of shareholdings, without specifying them.
Sunak’s adviser on ministerial interests, whom he appointed earlier this year, has said declaring all shareholdings would be an “excessive degree of intrusion into the private affairs of ministers that would be unreasonable, particularly in respect of their family members”.
However, in April 2023 Sunak had to declare that his wife had a shareholding in a childcare business called Koru Kids, which was due to benefit from a policy brought in at the budget. The standards commissioner also found that Sunak should have declared the interest when asked about it in a select committee hearing.
Labour’s Pat McFadden, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, called for greater transparency in relation to Murty’s investments. He said: “Once again there is a government scheme which has given money to companies in which the prime minister’s wife has invested. In this case it is from a government fund that was set up despite the chief executive of the British Business Bank, who administered it, warning that value for money from the scheme was ‘highly uncertain’.
“It is obviously important that any interests in companies which benefited from the taxpayers’ money used to fund the scheme are not only registered but also properly declared when the scheme is discussed in parliamentary proceedings.”
A government source said: “Labour supported the Future Fund at the time with Wes Streeting [now the shadow health secretary] expediting it through parliament, so this is a cynical attack by Labour showing they will say anything if it suits them politically.”
The Guardian has identified 17 shareholdings that have been held by Murty or her venture capital company Catamaran Ventures UK at various points during Sunak’s time as chancellor or prime minister, none of which he voluntarily disclosed. Koru Kids is still the only one to have been declared.
Those not previously in the public domain include a health and beauty range based on Chinese medicine called Elemental Herbology; a luxury jeweller, Fentons; a fashion website, LuxFix; and a now defunct gym business called Resonant Frequency.
Catamaran Ventures UK is funded by Murty personally through a £4m interest-free loan. It recently announced that it was being wound down.
She has rarely talked about her business interests in public but in 2017 Murty is understood to have given a presentation to delegates at a trade department event, presenting her shareholdings as part of her billionaire father Narayana Murthy’s overarching business empire.
The slide presentation, seen by the Guardian, described Catamaran as a “family office (private capital) founded by Indian tech entrepreneur NR Narayana Murthy with locations in Bangalore and London”, suggesting the London office was an offshoot of the overall Murty empire.
It said there was a “strong focus in India on private investments … education, technology, healthcare, consumer key sectors” while the “focus in London [is] on the consumer sector – brands in their growth phase”.
It listed London-based brands Digme Fitness, Bing! of Acamar Studios and Bloom and Wild in a graphic under the same umbrella as her father’s firm’s investments in Paperboat, Amazon India, Infosys and Yebhi.
None of Sunak’s father-in-law’s business interests or his wife’s £600m-plus stake in Infosys, a major Indian IT company, appear on the prime minister’s public register of ministerial interests.
A government spokesperson said: “The Future Fund successfully helped nearly 1,200 firms of all shapes and sizes across the country get through the pandemic by stimulating investment in a range of sectors from digital tech to life sciences.
“The scheme unlocked investment for high-growth firms who may not have been able to access other Covid loans support, supporting them through the pandemic and allowed them to continue to break new ground in technology and innovation.”
The Guardian has approached Carousel Ventures/Heist and Hoberman for comment.
