Oppenheimer and South Africa’s richest woman send a warning to the UK
Economic mismanagement and long lead times to complete key projects are among the factors that make the UK uninvestable right now, according to South African investors with interests in both countries.
Estimates that it will take three decades to turn an 18-mile stretch of the A66 road in northern England into a dual carriageway show the challenges of doing business there, said Jonathan Oppenheimer, scion of the family that built Anglo American Plc and De Beers into global mining powerhouses.
“So long as the UK takes 30 years to do a nine-month project, it’s uninvestable,” Oppenheimer, the executive chairman of investment and philanthropic group Oppenheimer Generations, said on a panel at the Bloomberg Africa Business Summit in Johannesburg on Tuesday.
The billionaire family’s business interests span parts of the UK, Africa and Asia.
Magda Wierzycka, the chief executive officer of financial-services firm Sygnia Ltd., which opened a UK office in 2019, echoed those sentiments.
She characterized the UK government’s handling of the economy as “mismanagement.”
“A scary country — wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,” she said.
That gloomy assessment contrasts with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s efforts to cast his Labour government as one committed to building.
The Labour Party says it has attracted £100 billion of investment commitments from private equity giant Blackrock Inc. — to be delivered over the next decade — and £50 billion from other US firms.
The government is simplifying its planning regime and approved 20 major infrastructure projects in its first year in office, including three new airport runways. That compares with 57 over the five-year Conservative government’s tenure to 2024.
In addition, pension-fund reforms are under way to deploy more UK capital into local projects and the National Wealth Fund and the National Housing Bank have been established to get private money to co-invest with the state in green energy, infrastructure and new homes.
Still, Wierzycka said Britain’s departure from the European Union after Brexit “basically eliminated” skills coming into the UK, and with about a quarter of its population on social welfare, the business environment has become difficult.
“Try finding a waiter, try finding a builder — it’s unavailable except for Polish people,” said Wierzycka, who was born in Poland.
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