WealthDFM | March 2021
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Will Woodford really return? News that Neil Woodford is planning to launch a new asset management business in the UK has, so far, not been received well by the investment community - nor indeed by the regulator. So what’s going on? And what are his chances of getting this new business off the ground?
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ike many others across the UK, the Wealth DFM team were somewhat surprised to read the interview with Neil Woodford published in the Sunday Telegraph in February. It revealed that Woodford was planning a return to asset management, albeit with a new business – Woodford Capital Management Partners Ltd –(WCM Partners Ltd) targeted at ‘professional’ investors rather than private clients and based in Buckinghamshire and Jersey. If the proposed plans were to go ahead, then WDM Partners Ltd. would work to advise Acacia Research, an American investment group which bought many of the unquoted assets from within Woodford’s Equity Income fund back in July 2020. The new venture would likely see Woodford investing (or “advising on”) again in illiquid, unquoted and fledgling businesses – most probably those within the healthcare, lifesciences and pharmaceuticals sectors with which he had become so infatuated whilst
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running retail money. And which had played such a huge part in his downfall. Of course, there are still many thousands of private investors still waiting for the last of their money back from his failed Woodford Equity Income Fund, along with other investors nursing serious losses from his management of other mandates.
If the proposed plans were to go ahead, then WDM Partners Ltd. would work to advise Acacia Research, an American investment group which bought many of the unquoted assets from within Woodford’s Equity Income fund back in July 2020
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