At 76, Bellevue-born Sir Mark Weinberg shows no sign of slowing down. President of St James's Place Plc, one of the UK's top private-client wealth managers, with £16bn under management, he is a serial innovator in insurance and investment.
His office in Spencer House, the 18th-century private palace at Green Park, London, is littered with bulging files on several desks positioned around the room. There are large stacks of financial publications and reports. It is unequivocally a workspace.
Sir Mark recently launched two big new projects: the Pension Insurance Corp, which he set up with £1bn backing capital to buy out the liabilities of failing pension schemes; and Synergy Insurance, which he formed 18 months ago to offer medium-sized companies the same benefits large companies reap by forming their own captive insurance company.
"The life assurance market has been characterised by a lot of innovation, but general insurance has not," he says.
"I don't believe in retiring. I'm actually doing more now than I was before. I have four or five projects on the go."
Born in 1931 and a King Edwards old boy, he took his first degree in commerce at Wits, where he stayed on for an LLM. He was called to the bar in Johannesburg, and set off for London in 1957 for another master's degree, in company law, at the London School of Economics.
He shuttled between his studies in London and practising as an advocate in Johannesburg for four years until 1961, when he moved to London permanently.
"We were close with the founders of the Liberal Party; we had similar values. To stay in SA would have been swimming against a personal tide."
Joining a group of close friends who had moved to Hampstead in north London, Weinberg decided to take a "40-year view". "My choice was between practising law in the UK, or going into business. I had no connections in London; it's difficult to practise law without connections."
In SA, Weinberg had helped Donald Gordon's fledgling Liberty Life develop pension scheme sales literature that was both legal and made the scheme attractive to buyers. Gordon suggested Weinberg start up a London office for Liberty Life, but Weinberg declined, doubting the English would buy life assurance from a three-year-old start-up in the colonies.
Instead, Gordon put up 25% of the £50 000 seed capital for Abbey Life, the company Weinberg founded in December 1961. Prominent countrymen Joel Joffe and Sydney Lipworth were to join the group in later years, and their association would last 25 years. The outfit quickly made a name for itself and was bought out by American conglomerate ITT. Other successful insurance ventures followed.
In 1990 he joined Lord Rothschild, and together they set up J Rothschild Assurance in 1991. Six years later the name was changed to St James's Place Plc, of which Sir Mark is president and chairman of the investment forum.
But his back is turned on SA. He speaks of his elder brother who, the evening after serving as an Independent Electoral Commission observer in the 1994 elections, was shot and killed in a hijacking in the driveway of his daughter's Edenvale home. He attended the funeral but has not set foot in the country since.
"I have memories of its being an incredible country to live in, but don't have reservations about not living there. I doubt I would invest there. It is an economically promising country provided, firstly, that the crime becomes manageable, and secondly that it does not follow the example of the rest of the African continent in terms of corruption.
"I saw this country [the UK] paralysed by union power, which is about not letting the market function. I will always respect Maggie Thatcher for taking on what they called in Europe the English disease ' - that you couldn't do anything without causing a strike. She broke the stranglehold of the unions.
"SA should be a serious industrial power over the next 20- 30 years, but can become that only if the market has not been interfered with, and if the plums haven't gone to a few select party officials."
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