South Africa’s richest woman has vowed to fight “tooth and nail” against the government’s plans to scrap the non-dom regime and accused the Chancellor of not understanding economics if she goes ahead with the reforms.
Magda Wierzycka, a Polish-born South African investor who founded the Johannesburg-listed investment company Sygnia, told City AM she will leave the UK unless the Chancellor amends the policy before its introduction in April, and said that “all of the [non-doms she knows] are leaving”.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves opted to press ahead with plans to scrap the non-dom regime as part of last month’s Budget. In its place the government will introduce residence-based scheme in April 2025 that will only allow wealthy foreigners to claim tax breaks on their foreign assets for up to four years, as opposed to the current 20.
Wierzycka, who since arriving in the UK in 2019 has founded the venture capital firm Braavos Investment Advisers, said: “[I watched the Budget] going ’This is not real. These people don’t understand economics.’ There’s this perception of non-doms being these fat cats who don’t pay any tax. Well I’ve got news for you: we are people who have come here to start businesses, to employ people.”
Wierzycka’s warnings come as new research from Oxford Economics, shared exclusively with City AM, found that an alternative system to the current non-dom regime being proposed by a non-dom lobby group could raise £650m and lead to a 61 per cent rise in the non-dom population this parliament.
The proposal from Foreign Investors for Britain – called the Tiered Tax Regime – would allow wealthy foreigners to opt into an iteration of a wealth tax whereby users would pay an annual flat rate of between £500,000 and £2m in order to keep their foreign assets not liable to UK tax.
Oxford Economics, which in this instance only examined the regime’s revenue raising capacity as opposed to any positive economic side effects of attracting wealthy foreign nationals, has previously estimated that the government’s reforms will cost the exchequer £900m due to an exodus of wealthy foreign taxpayers.
The Treasury was approached for comment.