Neil Woodford, Woodford Investment Management.
Woodford Investment Management
LONDON – Neil Woodford, the former British star stock picker whose investment company collapsed in 2019, has said “sorry” to investors for the losses when he shared plans to make a comeback with a new company.
Woodford said in an interview with The Telegraph published Saturday that he was very sorry for what I had done wrong.
The fund manager also announced that it would launch a new investment company, Woodford Capital Management Partners, in Jersey. The company will reportedly raise money only from professional investors and will focus on the biotech sector, UK life sciences and healthcare.
Support for riskier young and privately held companies in these areas, combined with poor performance from other stock selections, sparked a wave of investors repayments from the Woodford Equity Income Fund. This resulted in the suspension and eventual liquidation of the fund, forcing 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 common investors had to wait months to get their money back.
Woodford made a name for himself in the dot-com bubble by shunning expensive tech stocks and selling out in the run-up to the financial crisis while at Invesco.
Woodford said in the Telegraph interview that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life “hiding and beating myself up 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 the Woodford fund.
In the interview, Woodford defended his former firm’s culture by saying that the criticism he faced in the media “hurts”.
He also focused on the administration of the fund, Link Fund Solutions, before closing Wood Equity Income.
“I did not make the decision to suspend the fund, I did not make the decision to liquidate the fund,” Woodford said.
“As history will now show, those decisions were incredibly damaging to investors, and they weren’t mine,” he added, saying they were “Link’s decisions.”
A Link Fund Solutions spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on Woodford’s comments when he reached out to CNBC.
Link has refuted Woodford’s claim, according to an Investment Week article in which he said that any suggestion that the company “was not aware of the possibility of the suspension, or was not discussing the suspension decision, is false.”