• The 60-year-old was the first woman to become Australia’s top-earning CEO

Australia’s biggest investment bank Macquarie Group chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who arrived in Australia with just $200 in their pockets now makes $315,000 a week as the nation’s highest-paid CEO.   

Macquarie Group chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake earned $16.39 million in 2021, the bank announced in its latest report.  

Ms Wikramanayake guided Macquarie - dubbed the country’s ‘millionaire factory’ - to profits of $1.3billion in the last three months of the year, the Daily Mail reported.  In 2019, the 60-year-old was the first woman to become Australia’s top-earning CEO.  She migrated to Australia in the 1970s with her family at the age of 14 before attending Sydney’s elite $34,000-a-year Ascham School and quickly rising up the ranks as a lawyer and a banker.  
Her father Ranji told the Australian Financial Review in 2018 the family had enjoyed a life of privilege growing up in Sri Lanka, but they fell on tough times before finally settling in Australia in 1975.  The Wikramanayakes came from a long line of highly-educated barristers and powerful figures.