Infosys, with More H-1Bs than Anyone Else, Now Has Kin at the British Treasury

By David North on July 31, 2019

The octopus-like power of Infosys, the huge Indian outsourcing firm which has more H-1Bs (57,685 in the years 2015-2017) than any other firm in the States, showed up on the other side of the pond recently.

Boris Johnson, the new Conservative prime minister, placed the son-in-law of the boss of Infosys, N. R. Narayana Murthy, at the edge of his new cabinet. He is Rishi Sunak, a member of the House of Commons, who will now also serve as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

The position, in one of the oddities of British governance, is that of the chief deputy to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), and that official sits with, but is not a member of, the Cabinet. Sunak held a lesser position in the previous government of Mrs. May.

Sunak has, as one might expect from a prominent Tory, an Oxford degree; unusually, this is supplemented by an MBA from Stanford, which he secured while a Fulbright student.

While Sunak was born in the U.K., his father-in-law comes from Karnataka, one of the three south Indian states where a disproportionately large portion of the H-1Bs are recruited, as we reported in an earlier posting.

[BTW, I have a modest managed brokerage account, in which I am not consulted about purchases and sales of stock. A few months ago the broker sold Infosys short, expecting its price to fall, having apparently paid attention to the cries from industry that the Trump administration was being tough with the H-1B program. My broker continues to hold INFY short but the stock has climbed in value. In short, INFY fans, not to worry.]