The Active-Reactive Induction Motor (ARIM) has been introduced in literature as an alternative to the synchronous motor in medium voltage Load Commutated Inverter (LCI) fed drives. The resulting drive has been shown to have lower cost with improved reliability and ruggedness. The ARIM is basically a squirrel cage induction motor with two sets of three-phase stator windings. While one winding is rated for high voltage and power, the other winding is rated for a lower voltage and power. The system is controlled such that the low voltage winding fed from a VSI, supplies enough reactive power to the machine so that a leading power factor is seen at the terminals of the high voltage winding. This enables the high voltage winding to be fed from a LCI which supplies all the active power. The ARIM being a non-conventional machine intended for a specific Medium Voltage (MV) drive topology, requires some special design considerations. This paper describes the effect of leakage flux on the operation of the MV LCI fed ARIM drive. An iterative design procedure to obtain the optimum ratings of the VSI and the flux winding is proposed. The proposed method is illustrated with an example design of a 6.6 kV, 1 MW ARIM drive. A prototype 3.3 kV, 75 kW ARIM is built to verify the design. © 2018 IEEE.