Rishi Sunak announced £58 million of funding to protect the Jewish community which is going to security firms partly owned by his wife, Akshata Murty.
Full Fact can find no evidence that this is true. The Prime Minister pledged £54 million to the Community Safety Trust to increase security at Jewish buildings. The charity says the claim is “false and groundless” and the creator of the original video has since removed it from TikTok.
A video being widely shared online claims that Rishi Sunak’s wife will benefit from money from the government to protect Jewish sites in the UK. But Full Fact can find no evidence that this claim is true. The original video was deleted after we got in touch.
The video was originally uploaded to TikTok on 29 February and has since been shared by different accounts on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), and over 10,000 times on Facebook, with text versions of the claim also being shared on the platform.
During the clip, a man says: “You [Rishi Sunak] signed off this morning for £58 million to protect the Jewish community.”
He goes on to say: “But that £58 million is going to security firms isn’t it? Yes it is. And who owns shares in that? It’s not your wife, is it? It f****** is, isn’t it?
“The security firms that are looking after the Jewish people, and the Jewish community currently are owned and run by a company owned by your wife.”
However, Full Fact can find no evidence that there is a financial link between Mr Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, and a funding pledge to increase security at Jewish buildings in the UK.
After we got in touch, the creator removed the video from TikTok and said they were not able to provide a source to support the claim.
Honesty in public debate matters
You can help us take action – and get our regular free email
The video appears to relate to a pledge by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to give a charity an extra £54 million (not £58 million as the posts claim) to increase security at Jewish community sites in the UK.
He made this pledge on 28 February. The funding is going to the Community Security Trust, a charity that aims to protect Jewish people in Britain from antisemitism and related threats.
The £54 million takes the total amount of government funding awarded to the charity as part of the Jewish Community Protective Security Grant to over £70 million over the next four years. It had previously been awarded £18 million for the 2024/25 year.
The government says the funding will be used to increase security at buildings including Jewish schools and synagogues, by providing protective measures such as security guards, CCTV and alarm systems.
However, contrary to the claim in the video, we could find no evidence of any link between this funding pledge and Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty.
The Community Security Trust (CST) says that in 2022/23 it employed guards from 55 different security companies.
A spokesperson for the charity told us: “CST’s role in the management of the grant is to receive the full amount from the government and then disburse the funds to hundreds of grantees, i.e. Jewish schools, synagogues and other communal buildings or vulnerable sites around the country, who use the funds to contract security guards from commercial security firms.
“In the vast majority of cases CST does not contract the security firms directly; they are contracted by the individual community buildings in question. This process is fully invoiced and audited and we conduct regular quality control checks to ensure that the quantity and standard of security guarding at Jewish community sites covered by the grant is appropriate for their security needs.
“We do not issue any guidance or restrictions regarding which firms should be contracted for this work on the basis of their ownership or shareholders, nor does central government impose any conditions on CST in that regard, so the idea that the Jewish community locations that benefit from this grant are being somehow directed or steered towards using security companies owned by Akshata Murphy [sic] (or anyone else) is completely false and groundless.”
Ms Murty is a businesswoman with shares in Infosys, the multinational IT and consulting company her father co-founded.
She has previously started a fashion label, and together with Mr Sunak founded a London-based offshoot of her family’s investment fund, Catamaran Ventures, which she became solely responsible for after Mr Sunak was elected as an MP in 2015. It had received media scrutiny over some of the companies it had backed benefitting from taxpayer-funded schemes.
According to records on Companies House, the company is now in ‘liquidation’ and a voluntary liquidator was appointed in January.
Ms Murty is not currently a director of any operating companies. She has reportedly been a shareholder in a range of companies, including Jamie Oliver’s Pizzeria, flower delivery company Bloom & Wild, Wendy’s restaurants in India and New & Lingwood—a men’s apparel store.
She had also been a shareholder of a childcare company, Koru Kids, which led to an apology from the Prime Minister in 2023 for not disclosing the link during a Commons committee appearance. Ms Murty subsequently donated her shares to charity.
Sir Matthew Ryecroft, the most senior civil servant at the Home Office, wrote to Home Secretary James Cleverly on 28 February saying that a three-year award of direct funding to the Community Security Trust did not meet propriety or value for money tests around a lack of competition run for the grant. But this is unrelated to Ms Murty, or her business interests.
We have contacted Number 10 and Infosys for comment regarding the claim and will update this article if they respond.
Full Fact has previously written about other false and misleading claims relating to Ms Murty, including that a video showed her using Instagram while driving, that she lives in Downing Street whilst claiming to live abroad for tax purposes and that the company her father co-founded, Infosys, is registered in Rwanda.
Image courtesy of Number 10
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there is no evidence that Akshata Murty, the wife of Rishi Sunak, stands to benefit financially from a grant to a charity to protect Jewish community sites.
Full Fact fights for good, reliable information in the media, online, and in politics.
Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.