From Sri Lankan privilege to British outcast: Remarkable family life of Macquarie CEO Shemara Wikramanayake

She is one of the great examples of Australian meritocracy, a woman who smashed stereotypes about what a CEO should look like.

Shemara Wikramanayake, who rose from an immigrant Sri Lankan family to head Australia’s top investment bank, announced her retirement shortly before the Macquarie Group annual meeting in Sydney today.

The woman with the difficult-to-pronounce surname and modest personality succeeded in the high-ego world of finance through sheer competence. Known for her emotional intelligence, equanimity and numeracy and known to friends as “Shem”, Ms Wikramanayake was “always gracious and effective in dealing with the successes as well as the inevitable challenges” predecessor Nicholas Moore told The Nightly.

But the first Asian woman to run a large Australian public company adopted a low profile during her eight years in charge, avoiding personality profiles that could have focused on her family’s remarkable journey from privilege to failure and back to success.

The Wikramanayake family were prominent lawyers in Colombo in the 1960s associated with the right-wing United National Party. They adopted the habits of the British upper classes, socialised at the races and had large domestic staffs.

Ironically, given Ms Wikramanayake’s career at Macquarie, the family opposed Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female head of government. The left-wing Mrs Bandaranaike was removed from power by Parliament in 1965, but won an election in 1970, an event that was a disaster for the wealthy Wikramanayakes.

The new government changed the country’s name from the Dominion of Ceylon to the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. It cracked down on business, nationalised industries and switched the court system from English to Sinhalese, the language of the regular people.

Adding to the family’s problems, the Prime Minister had a grudge against Ms Wikramanayake’s grandfather, EG Wikramanayake. He had successfully defended a man accused of participating in a conspiracy to assassinate her husband, Ceylon’s fourth prime minister, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.

Moving twice

As Sri Lanka’s economy began to collapse under socialist policies, EG Wikramanayake tried to get the family’s money out through a property sale in London, according to his late son, Nimal Wikramanayake. The authorities found out and prepared to arrest him for breaching controls on moving capital, according to the son.

He fled to London where Ms Wikramanayake’s father, Ranji was studying an advanced medical degree. Ranji’s scholarship and hospital position were cancelled by hostile authorities in Colombo, leaving him to support his wife and children with temporary medical work.

Unable to secure a permanent job in Britain, which had turned on foreigners, Ranji and his wife Amara and three children emigrated to Australia with $200. Ms Wikramanayake was eight. “We lost everything in 1970 and we started life again,” her father said in 2018. “And we started everything again when we moved to Sydney.”

The move was a success. All of the Wikramanayakes established successful careers in Australia, although none became as prominent as Shemara.

She joined Macquarie Bank in 1987, when it was near the start of a growth phase that turned it into the most successful Australian financial services business operating internationally.

Now known as Macquarie Group and worth $99 billion, the company’s market valuation is more than twice as big as when she became chief executive on December 1, 2018, and almost as big as Coles, Qantas and Fortescue combined. In keeping with the bank’s culture of avoiding public promotion of individual executives, she deflected praise offered by individual shareholders today.

“I’ve got no regrets and it’s really been a privilege to work here,” she said at the annual meeting. “I don’t think I can take credit because it is always a team effort.”

Her last day is November 6.