One of South Africa’s richest women is back home after living in ‘scary’ European country
Magda Wierzycka, one of South Africa’s richest women and the co-founder and CEO of Sygnia, noted that she has recently returned to South Africa from the United Kingdom.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Africa Business Summit 2025, Wierzycka said the UK has become “uninvestable” and a “scary” environment for anyone looking to deploy capital.
Drawing on her experience of spending the past five years moving between South Africa and the UK, she argued that the country’s economic direction and policy choices have eroded its attractiveness.
Wierzycka explained that her recent return to South Africa has reinforced her concerns about the state of the UK economy.
“I’ve just come back to South Africa and the UK government is uninvestable,” she said.
She added that the scale of welfare dependence is alarming for investors, suggesting that even relatively common conditions qualify people for assistance.
“If you’ve got an anxiety disorder, you can get social benefits”. For Wierzycka, this signals deep structural challenges.
According to Wierzycka, the combined effect of Brexit and a swollen benefits system is a shortage of available labour and a weakened economic base.
She pointed out the difficulty of finding skilled workers, particularly in sectors such as construction. “It’s an economy that has been completely destroyed.”
Wierzycka argued that the policy environment has deteriorated further under the current political leadership.
She stressed that the Labour Party has just come into power in the UK, warning that this means “four more years of this mismanagement of the economy.”
In her view, this outlook should give investors serious pause. “A scary country—wouldn’t touch with a bargepole,” Wierzycka said.
By contrast, she finds South Africa more compelling from an investment and business perspective despite its well-known challenges.
Jonathan Oppenheimer, scion of the family that built Anglo American Plc and De Beers into global mining powerhouses, also called the UK uninvestable.
“So long as the UK takes 30 years to do a nine-month project, it’s uninvestable,” said Oppenheimer.
UK’s overhaul of its tax treatment of non-doms is also a problem
Wierzycka first considered moving back to South Africa at the beginning of the year due to the UK’s new tax laws.
The laws form part of the UK’s overhaul of its tax treatment of non-domiciled residents, or “non-doms”, announced in the Autumn 2024 Budget.
Under the existing regime, non-doms who have lived in the UK for fewer than 15 of the previous 20 years can legally shield their foreign income and assets from UK tax by placing them in trusts.
These structures allow non-doms to avoid paying tax in the UK on wealth already taxed elsewhere, as long as the money remains offshore.
But under the new rules, these trusts will be taxed like any other, including any income or gains from foreign sources, even if those have already been taxed in another jurisdiction, such as South Africa.
Wierzyka previously expressed her dismay with the changes, saying that they deter investment in the country and make no sense to bring more money in.
Wierzycka was born in Poland in 1969. Her family fled to Austria in 1982 due to Poland’s economic collapse and political turmoil, and arrived in South Africa in 1983.
She completed her schooling at Pretoria High School for Girls before enrolling at the University of Cape Town, where she studied actuarial science on a bursary.
Wierzycka is an incredibly successful South African businesswoman.
She began her career at Southern Life and later joined Alexander Forbes, where she helped build the asset consulting division for retirement fund clients.
Although she was trained as an actuary, she discovered a passion for investment and asset management.
In 1997, she took a chance by joining a then-small asset manager called Coronation as its 14th employee.
She later co-founded Sygnia, which expanded into a financial powerhouse managing over R406 billion in assets under her leadership.
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