Sydney Lipworth leant back in his chair, jacket off, tie twisted to show an old dry cleaning tag, and locked his hands behind his head. “I’m not a terribly discerning person, aesthetically,” he said. “I’m largely oblivious to my surroundings. I do not notice the clothes people wear, I’m not that observant. I notice their demeanour. I don’t like spending money on myself. I like to be well dressed, but not flashy, and I have very few needs after that.”
Although he built a personal fortune running into the millions, he drove a five-year-old Ford Fiesta. “It’s easier around town,” he said. “I do not believe in trappings. If I need something for a particular purpose then I will go and get it, but not otherwise.”
He was the quiet planner among three former school friends who quit South Africa, because they opposed apartheid, and revolutionised life assurance in Britain. Lord Joffe (obituary, June 21, 2017) was the legal brain and the frontman was Sir Mark Weinberg. Lipworth, also a trained lawyer, was the product creator and had the idea of designing policies for professionals, who had until then largely been ignored while most insurers went for the relatively easy pickings in the mass market. He was usually in the office before 9am and often stayed up until 4am the following morning, reading documents at home before retiring then rising again a few hours later. “I can cope without having had much sleep,” he said, “but every so often I need a long stint of seven or eight hours to catch up.”
Weinberg was the first to arrive in London, founding in 1961 Abbey Life Assurance, a name he chose because he thought it had trustworthy connotations. Lipworth and his wife Rosa followed three years later with £90 in their bank account. Joffe completed the trio in 1965 after he had been ejected from South Africa and Australia for acting as a solicitor to Nelson Mandela in the so-called Rivonia trial that jailed Mandela for 27 years.
They sold Abbey to the US-based ITT in 1970 and began again with Hambro Life, later renamed Allied Dunbar, which earned the industry nickname Allied Crowbar for its sometimes overenthusiastic sales methods. It was taken over in 1985 by BAT Industries, which sold it in 1998 to Zurich Financial Services.
Lipworth was deputy chairman of Allied Dunbar until 1988, when he took on the full-time chairmanship of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) for a five-year term, having been a part-timer on the commission for seven years. His reign coincided with unprecedented corporate takeover activity and territorial incursions from the European Commission, whose competition tsar, the British politician Sir Leon (later Lord) Brittan, thought he and not Lipworth should handle big international mergers. Lipworth resisted, but Brittan got his way. The MMC became part of the Competition and Markets Authority in 2014.
Patricia Mann, of J Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, an MMC member for nine years, said: “[Lipworth] was an exceptional individual. His legal background gave him a good grasp of his subject and made him perfect for the job. He also had a great talent for getting out of individuals the bit they can contribute the best. People who were in front of him at the commission said he was very firm, very fair, very courteous and very much in control. In situations where some people might get in a tizz, he remained calm and consistent.”
When The Times awarded Lipworth a magnum of Krug champagne as one of the business figures of 1997, he passed it to the MMC staff to raffle for charity. It raised £190 for a spina bifida charity.
Maurice Sydney Lipworth was born in Johannesburg in 1931, the only son of an accountant, Isidore Lipworth (who changed his name from Lipschitz), and Rae (née Sindler), who were originally from Lithuania and Latvia respectively. Sydney had an older sister, Leonora, who died young. He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he received top prizes for BComm and LLB degrees. He represented school and university at tennis.
In 1956 Lipworth was touring Europe after graduating when he met the French-born Rosa Liwarek at an Austrian winter sports hotel. They married two years later and had two sons. Frank is a lawyer based in Paris while Bertrand, who worked in finance, died from a brain tumour in 2015. Rosa had been a Jewish “hidden child”, one of thousands placed with Christian families to escape the Nazis. In 2010 she was appointed CBE for charitable work.
Lipworth was called to the South African Bar in 1956 and to the UK Bar in 1991. He was a barrister at One Essex Court, chairman of the Bar Association for Commerce, Finance and Industry, and a member of the General Council of the Bar. He became deputy chairman of NatWest Group, chairman of the NatWest Group Charitable Trust and a trustee of the Allied Dunbar Charitable Trust. He was on the advisory panel of Breakthrough, a breast cancer charity that is now part of Breast Cancer Now. He was chairman of the Marie Curie Cancer Care 50th anniversary appeal in 1997-98.
He chaired Zeneca, the pharmaceutical demerged from ICI until it merged with Astra of Sweden in 1999 to form AstraZeneca. He was a director of Carlton Communications, the gas supplier Centrica and the stockbroker Cazenove & Co. He was knighted in 1991 for his contribution to the MMC and became an honorary QC in 1993.
Lipworth chaired the Philharmonia Orchestra Trust and was a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2018 he hosted a concert at his London home featuring the Israeli Opera and the celebrated Palestinian soprano Nour Darwish. He had an extensive art collection and supported the South Bank Foundation, Sadler’s Wells and the Contemporary Dance Trust. He maintained a lifelong interest in tennis as a member of Queen’s Club in west London and belonged to the Reform Club.
“Money was hard to come by for me at first,” he said, “but once I got started I always made a good living and I do like the idea of having security. I am not, however, a person who is a great accumulator of possessions. Nor am I a great gourmet, or passionate about certain wines. I’m quite easy to please.”
Sir Sydney Lipworth KC, lawyer and businessman, was born on May 13, 1931. He died on June 27, 2025, aged 94