TDP's Pemmasani second richest to contest Lok Sabha polls in 20 years

With over Rs 5,700 crore in declared family assets, Chandra Sekhar Pemmasani, the Telugu Desam Party’s Lok Sabha (LS) candidate from Guntur, has emerged as the richest candidate in the elections thus far.

He is the second richest candidate to contest the LS election in at least two decades based on declared assets. The richest candidate to do so was Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder of Infosys, who contested as a Congress candidate from Bangalore South in the 2014 general election.

Previously, Nakul Nath, son of former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Nath, was considered the richest candidate in the 2024 elections with declared assets of over Rs 716 crore, according to data from Phase I of elections collated by the Association for Democratic Reforms.

The majority of Pemmasani’s assets are in the moveable segment. He has a little over Rs 100 crore in immoveable assets, including those of his spouse and dependents.

His key holdings include listed US shares and exchange-traded funds worth over Rs 2,400 crore. Some of the US companies Pemmasani has investments in include JP Morgan, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet Inc, Tesla, Mondelez International, Apple Inc, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and ExxonMobil, among 101 others.

Other assets include five cars worth over Rs 6.1 crore, which include two Mercedes-Benz, one Tesla Model X, one Rolls-Royce Ghost, and one Toyota Fortuner.

The richest candidate in 2004 was Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar, the Congress candidate from Mysuru, with assets over Rs 1,500 crore.

In 2009, V M Singh (Congress) had the highest assets of Rs 632 crore.

Ramesh Kumar Sharma, an Independent from Pataliputra, declared the highest assets worth Rs 1,107 crore in 2019.

Pemmasani is a businessman, according to his affidavit. He graduated as a doctor from Andhra Pradesh in 1999 and subsequently completed his Doctor of Medicine from the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania, in 2005.