South African billionaire Magda Wierzycka warns the UK is no longer safe for global investors

Magda Wierzycka has seen the United Kingdom from the inside. She lived there for six years, ran a venture capital firm out of London, and was actively raising a fourth fund to deploy capital into British startups when she decided to pull back. Now she is back in South Africa, and she is not staying quiet about why.

The billionaire co-founder and CEO of Sygnia Ltd, South Africa's second-largest asset management company, has issued a blunt warning to global investors: the UK is no longer offering the stability and predictability that once made it one of the world's premier investment destinations.

"The UK is no longer offering the same level of certainty it once did," Wierzycka said in a recent interview, describing a market increasingly burdened by policy uncertainty, rising taxation and slowing economic growth. She added that high-net-worth individuals and institutional funds are now reassessing their UK exposure and looking more favourably at emerging markets and the United States, where returns are perceived to be stronger and regulatory environments more predictable.

Wierzycka's departure from Britain was not simply a lifestyle decision. The immediate trigger was a sweeping overhaul of UK tax policy that directly targeted non-domiciled residents, a category that covered Wierzycka given her South African origins. New rules introduced under the Labour government extended inheritance tax to overseas assets held by long-term UK residents with foreign ties, effectively closing a tax arrangement that had made the UK attractive to wealthy international professionals for decades. The changes prompted a wave of reassessment among South African and other foreign expatriates living in London, many of whom had built long-term financial plans around the old non-dom framework.

Wierzycka had initially suggested she might stay and adapt. But she told investors directly: "The message to my investors is we'll be deploying the capital around the world. We are not coming to the UK." She wound down her London-based venture capital operations and returned to Johannesburg, where she has since launched a new fund focused on artificial intelligence startups in South Africa.

Her critique of the UK goes beyond her personal tax situation. She pointed to what she described as frequent regulatory adjustments that make long-term planning increasingly difficult for global investors. Capital gains and dividend tax pressures have risen. Policy reversals across multiple sectors have introduced uncertainty that she argues the UK did not previously carry. These are not abstract concerns for Wierzycka, who spent six years deploying capital into early-stage life sciences and technology companies in Britain and developed a close-up view of how the investment environment was shifting.

The broader context gives her remarks weight. London remains a leading global financial centre, home to one of the world's deepest capital markets and a concentration of talent that few cities can match. But competition from financial hubs in the Gulf, Singapore and the United States has intensified, and the UK's ability to attract and retain mobile capital is under pressure in a way it was not a decade ago.

Wierzycka herself is one of the more credible voices on this question. Born in Gliwice, Poland in 1969, she moved to South Africa as a teenager when her family left during the country's economic collapse. She trained as an actuary at the University of Cape Town, spent years at Coronation Fund Managers and then co-founded Sygnia in 2006 with a handful of staff and roughly 2 billion rand in assets under management. She built it into a firm now managing approximately 350 billion rand. She is widely regarded as Africa's wealthiest self-made woman, with an estimated net worth of around $250 million, and her publicly traded Sygnia stake alone is valued at approximately 2 billion rand.

Her decision to move to the UK in the first place was itself motivated by safety concerns. She had been outspoken for years against corruption under former President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family, and she concluded that the personal risk of remaining in South Africa had become too high. Returning home is, in its own way, a statement about how much her assessment of relative risks has shifted.

Her new South Africa-focused AI venture capital fund, announced in February 2026, is designed to retain local engineering talent and intellectual property that she says is currently being lost to overseas investors. She argued that South Africa has the same depth of technical talent as the UK or the United States, but lacks the structured capital to keep it at home.

The warning she is sounding about the UK is the other side of that argument: capital follows predictability, and right now, she is betting that predictability is easier to find outside Britain than in it.