For three decades, Crispin Odey stood above the London financial community, a larger-than-life financial mogul known for taking huge bets – and raking in big wins when they were right.
But in just over a week, his hedge fund will suddenly be on the brink of dissolution, struck down by the latest allegations of sexual assault and harassment against its 64-year-old founder.
The company, Odey Asset Management, said on Thursday it was in “advanced talks” to transfer cash and staff to other companies. The reason, it noted with perhaps extreme understatement, was that it had become “obvious that some of the partnership’s investment management activities are affected by recent events.”
In a sign that investors were losing confidence in the company, Odey Asset Management said it would close one of its funds and prevent investors from withdrawing their money from others, after what the company described as “a significant number of redemption requests” . In the world of hedge funds, such a move, known as “gating,” is considered a drastic move designed to avoid the equivalent of a run in the bank.
It’s unclear how much money is left at Odey Asset Management, which passed $4.9 billion earlier this year.
Those events were kicked off on June 8 by a nearly 7,900-word investigation in The Financial Times, in which 13 women said Mr Odey assaulted or abused them — in his firm’s lavish offices in Mayfair, in his London mansion and at his mansion. in the west of England. Many of the women quoted also said Mr Odey’s behavior was known throughout the company.
In response, Odey Asset Management said it has treated allegations like this “extremely seriously” and has “in place robust policies and procedures” to comply with the law and financial regulations.
Within two days of the article being published, 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 whom provided critical banking services to the company — cut ties.
The Chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Committee, Harriett Baldwin, this week called on the Financial Conduct Authority, one of the country’s top financial regulators, to answer questions about its oversight of Odey Asset Management.
Among the questions Ms Baldwin put to the authority were the extent of her past investigations into Mr Odey and her wider work to oversee corporate handling of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Odey’s probable dissolution marks a reckoning for the founder, who stood out from the throng of London financiers with an aristocratically reckless image and a willingness to take counter-intuitive bets that paid him big bucks.
The financier, whose full name is Robin Crispin William Odey, was born into a family of industrialists and his grandfather was a conservative legislator. Mr Odey was educated at elite British institutions including Harrow School and Oxford University. Nevertheless, he started having money problems when his family fell into financial ruin. (He once described his father as a “waster from beginning to end”, whose debts forced the sale of the family home.)
After graduating from Oxford, Mr. Odey turned to banking as a way to regain his wealth. He started his own business in 1991 and founded Odey Asset Management as a vehicle for his intuitive trading style.
That propensity for big bets often paid off, as when he bet against British banks before 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 on bad bets.
His fortune made him a financial celebrity and he was a major donor to Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. (Kwasi Kwarteng, whose brief stint last year as the country’s finance minister under Prime Minister Liz Truss shattered investor confidence in the government, previously worked for Mr Odey’s company.)
Mr Odey also became an outspoken supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union – although he drew some criticism for also making £220 million, or $280 million, from market moves linked to the event.
In Odey-esque style, he quoted an Italian phrase, “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca,” or “The morning has gold in its mouth,” to the BBC the day after the Brexit referendum.
The allegations of sexual misconduct detailed by The Financial Times were not the first to be made against Mr Odey; previous allegations have come from The Times of London, Bloomberg News and a Tortoise Media podcast. In 2021, he went on trial for a claim of indecent assault involving a company employee. 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 firm have seemed poised for recovery: the flagship fund posted a 152 per cent return last year, thanks in large part to its highly profitable bets on UK government bonds, beset by the short-lived economic policies introduced by its former employee, Mr Kwarteng.
