For three decades, Crispin Odey reigned supreme in London’s financial world, a larger-than-life financial mogul known for making big bets – and reaping big wins when they turned out to be right.
But in just over a week, his hedge fund suddenly faces dissolution, rocked by recent allegations of sexual assault and harassment against its 64-year-old founder.
Odey Asset Management said Thursday it was in “advanced discussions” about transferring funds and staff to other companies. The reason, as it puts it with perhaps extreme understatement, is that “it has become clear that some of the partnership’s investment management activities have been affected by recent events.”
In a sign that investors were losing confidence in the company, Odey Asset Management announced it was closing one of its funds and had prevented investors from withdrawing their money from others after the company described a “significant number of redemption requests”. had. In the hedge fund world, such a move, known as “gating,” is seen as a drastic move designed to prevent a bank run.
It’s unclear how much cash remains at Odey Asset Management, which had $4.9 billion under management earlier in the year.
These events were initiated on June 8 by a nearly 7,900-word investigation in the Financial Times in which 13 women said Mr Odey had assaulted or abused them – at his firm’s opulent offices in Mayfair, at his London townhouse and in his country estate in western England. Many of the women cited also said that Mr. Odey’s behavior was known throughout the company.
In response, Odey Asset Management said it takes allegations like these “extremely seriously” and has “robust policies and procedures” in place to comply with the law and financial regulations.
Within two days of the article’s publication, the company said it had removed Mr Odey from the partnership. The company’s financial counterparties — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, all of which provided key banking services to the company — severed ties.
House of Commons Finance Committee Chair Harriett Baldwin this week asked the Financial Conduct Authority, one of the country’s leading financial regulators, to answer questions about its oversight of Odey Asset Management.
Questions Ms Baldwin put to the agency included the scope of her previous investigations into Mr Odey and her broader work overseeing how companies deal with allegations of sexual misconduct.
The likely dissolution of Odey marks a reckoning for its founder, who distinguished himself from the crowd of pinstriped financiers in London by an aristocratic daredevil image and a willingness to take counter-intuitive bets that netted him big bucks.
The financier, whose full name is Robin Crispin William Odey, was born into a line of industrialists and his grandfather was a Conservative lawmaker. Mr Odey was educated at elite UK institutions including Harrow School and Oxford University. Nevertheless, he had money problems when his family fell into financial ruin. (He once described his father as “a spendthrift from start to finish,” whose debts forced the sale of the family home.)
After graduating from Oxford, Mr Odey turned to banking to regain his fortune. In 1991 he became self-employed and founded Odey Asset Management as a vehicle for his instinctive trading style.
This tendency to bet big often paid off, such as when he bet against British banks ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. At its peak, the company managed more than $13 billion.
But he also often lost money. The company’s main fund lost nearly 50 percent in 2016 to bad bets.
His wealth made him a financial star and he was a major donor to Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. (Kwasi Kwarteng, whose brief tenure as the country’s finance minister under Prime Minister Liz Truss last year shook investor confidence in the government, previously worked for Mr Odey’s firm.)
Mr Odey also became a staunch supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union – although he drew some criticism for also earning £220million, or $280million, from market movements linked to the event.
In an Odey-like flourish, he quoted an Italian expression to the BBC the day after the Brexit referendum: “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca” or “The morning catches the worm”.
The allegations of sexual misconduct, detailed by the Financial Times, were not the first leveled against Mr Odey; Previous claims have been made by The Times of London, Bloomberg News and a Tortoise Media podcast. In 2021, he was on trial on a charge of lewd assault against an employee of the company. He was acquitted by the presiding judge, who told him, “You are leaving this courthouse with your good character intact.”
Since then, Mr Odey and his company appeared poised for a rebound: his flagship fund returned 152 per cent over the past year, thanks in large part to his highly profitable bets on UK government bonds, which have been battered by the short-lived economic policies unveiled from his former employee, Mr. Kwarteng.