Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been hired by tech giant Microsoft.
The former Conservative leader, who remains a Member of Parliament, has joined the Seattle-based tech company as a part-time paid senior advisor and will give the company “high-level strategic perspectives on macroeconomic and geopolitical trends” as well as how these “intersect with innovation, regulation and digital transformation.”
He will donate his salary to he and his wife, Akshata Murty, a numeracy skills charity, The Richmond Project.
Acoba, the watchdog which assesses MPs’ external employment, said Sunak would not advise on UK political issues.
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The Advisory Committee on Professional Appointments has been accused in the past of being ineffective and unable to prevent MPs from taking jobs that could cause a conflict of interest, or of allowing former MPs to use contacts made within government for personal gain.
Sunak served as Prime Minister between October 2022 and July 2024.
It was thought he might consider a job in California’s Silicon Valley after his general election defeat.
But in his final appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions as Conservative leader, Sunak pledged to spend more time “in the best place on Earth”, referring to his constituency of Richmond and Northallerton.
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He added: “If anyone needs me I’ll be in Yorkshire. »
Acoba warned Sunak that he should not provide advice to or on behalf of Microsoft on government work or its contracts until the end of next year.
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The former chancellor was also asked not to lobby the government or use his contacts in Whitehall during this period, and to limit his work to “providing advice on strategic, macro-economic and geopolitical matters which do not conflict” with his activities within Number 10.
The Cabinet Office told the watchdog that Sunak’s year on the Conservative benches “will have contributed to diminishing the importance and timeliness of the information” he had access to.
Sunak also took on a role at San Francisco-based Anthropic, which developed the Claude artificial intelligence (AI) models.
He has also become a senior advisor to Goldman Sachs since leaving the role, where he previously worked between 2001 and 2004.