Neil Woodford, Woodford Investment Management.
Woodford Investment Management
LONDON – Neil Woodford, the former UK stock picker whose investment firm went bankrupt in 2019, said “I’m sorry” to investors for the losses while sharing plans to make a return on 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 also announced that he would launch a new investment company, Woodford Capital Management Partners, in Jersey. The company is supposed to only raise money from professional investors and focus on the biotechnology, British biosciences and health sector.
Support for riskier companies at an early stage and unlisted in these areas, combined with the poor performance of other stock options, has led to a wave of bailouts from investors in the Woodford Equity Income Fund. This resulted in the fund being suspended and eventually liquidated, which forced the UK’s most famous fund manager to close its first company, Woodford Investment Management, in October 2019. The fund’s suspension and closure meant that ordinary investors they had to wait months to get their money back.
Woodford made his name in the dot-com bubble by avoiding expensive technology stocks and selling banks before 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 beat me up about things that happened two years ago”.
The UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is still investigating 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 scrutiny she faced in the media “hurts”.
It also aimed to manage the Link Fund Solutions fund to close Wood Equity Income.
“I didn’t make the decision to suspend the fund, I didn’t make the decision to liquidate the fund,” said Woodford.
“As history will now show, these decisions were incredibly damaging to investors, and they were not mine,” he added, saying they were “Link’s decisions”.
A spokesperson for Link Fund Solutions was not immediately available to comment on Woodford’s comments when contacted by CNBC.
Link refuted Woodford’s claim, according to an article in Investment Week, saying that any suggestion that the company “was not aware of the possibility of suspension, or did not engage in discussions about the decision to suspend, is incorrect.”