Neil Woodford, Woodford Investment Management.
Woodford Investment Management
LONDON – Neil Woodford, the former UK shareholder whose investment business collapsed in 2019, said investors were ‘sorry’ for the losses because he shared plans to start a new business.
Woodford said in an interview with The Telegraph, published on Saturday, that he was “very sorry for what I did wrong.”
The fund manager has also announced plans to launch a new investment venture, Woodford Capital Management Partners, in Jersey. The company will reportedly only raise money from professional investors and will focus on the biotechnology sector, UK life sciences and healthcare.
The support of riskier early and unlisted companies in these areas, coupled with poor performance of other equities, has led to a wave of investor redemptions from the Woodford Equity Income Fund. This led to the suspension and eventual liquidation of the fund, which forced the UK’s most well-known fund manager to close its first firm, Woodford Investment Management, in October 2019. The suspension and closure of the fund meant that ordinary investors had to wait months to get their money back.
Woodford made his name in the dotcom bubble by evading expensive tech stocks and selling banks in the run-up to the financial crisis while working at Invesco.
Woodford said in the Telegraph interview that for the rest of his life he did not want to “hide and defeat myself over things that happened the best part of two years ago.”
The UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is still investigating the events that led to the suspension of Woodford’s fund.
In the interview, Woodford defended the culture of his former firm, saying that the investigation it faces in the media ‘hurts’.
He also envisages the fund’s administration, Link Fund Solutions, for the closure of Wood Equity income.
“I did not make the decision to suspend the fund, but neither did the fund,” Woodford said.
“As history will now show, the decisions were incredibly detrimental to investors, and they were not mine,” he added, saying they were “Link’s decisions.”
A Link Fund Solutions spokesman was not immediately available for comment on Woodford’s comments.
According to Link, Woodford’s claim was refuted, according to an article in Investment Week, saying that any suggestion that the firm ‘was not aware of the possibility of suspension, or did not enter into discussions about the decision to suspend, was wrong. is.’