Neil Woodford, Woodford Investment Management.
Woodford Investment Management
LONDON – Neil Woodford, the former UK star seller whose investment firm collapsed in 2019, said “sorry” to investors for the losses because he shared plans to return with a new business.
Woodford said in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday that he was “very sorry for what I did wrong.”
The fund manager also announced that it will launch a new investment firm, Woodford Capital Management Partners, in Jersey. It seems that the company will raise money only from professional investors and will focus on the biotechnology, British biosciences and healthcare sectors.
The support of the riskier companies in the early stages and unlisted in these areas, combined with the poor performance of other stock options, was what led to a wave of redemptions of investors in the Woodford Equity Income Fund. This led to the suspension and eventual liquidation of the fund, which forced the UK’s most famous fund manager to close its first company, Woodford Investment Management, in October 2019. The suspension and closure of the fund meant that ordinary investors had to to wait months until I get my money back.
Woodford made his name in the dotcom balloon, avoiding expensive technology stocks and selling banks before the financial crisis, while working at Invesco.
Woodford said in an interview with the Telegraph that for the rest of his life he did not want to “hide and fight with me about what happened for the most part two years ago.”
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is continuing to investigate the events that led to the suspension of the Woodford fund.
In the interview, Woodford defended the culture of his former company, saying that the control he faced in the media “hurts”.
He also monitored the fund’s administration, Link Fund Solutions, for closing income from wood securities.
“We didn’t make the decision to suspend the fund, we didn’t make the decision to liquidate the fund,” Woodford said.
“As history will show now, those decisions were extremely harmful to investors and were not mine,” he added, saying it was “Link’s decisions.”
A spokesman for Link Fund Solutions was not immediately available to comment on Woodford’s remarks when contacted by CNBC.
Link rejected Woodford’s claim, according to an Investment Week article, that any suggestion that the company “was not aware of the possibility of suspension or did not engage in discussions about the suspension decision is incorrect.”