The hedge fund manager Crispin Odey will be banned from the City and hit with a £1.8m fine by the UK’s financial watchdog for deliberately attempting to “frustrate” a disciplinary process into sexual harassment allegations.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said on Monday that Odey had shown “reckless disregard” for the governance of his hedge fund and his conduct proved he was “not a fit and proper person to perform any function related to regulated activities”.
The 66-year-old Conservative and Brexit donor intends to challenge the decision, which relates to his behaviour between December 2021 and November 2022, in the upper tribunal.
The FCA provisional ruling comes more than four years after executives at his now-defunct hedge fund business, Odey Asset Management (OAM), first launched an internal investigation into harassment allegations at the firm in September 2020. Odey has denied any misconduct.
By 2021, the business had uncovered “numerous allegations of sexual harassment by Mr Odey of female members of staff between 2003 and 2020”, the FCA decision notice said. The investigation also found staff were reluctant to raise concerns about Odey’s behaviour because they did not want to “ruffle feathers”, or were concerned that “nothing would be done”.
The FCA said Odey later tried to obstruct OAM’s leadership from taking any action. That involved firing its entire executive committee – twice – in moves that the FCA said were “deliberately designed to frustrate OAM’s disciplinary process into his conduct in order to protect his own interests”.
The allegations, which emerged in the media in summer 2023, eventually led to him being removed from OAM, which announced plans to close in October that year. OAM, which Odey founded in 1991, is now in the process of winding down and has been transferring funds to other asset managers.
The FCA, which launched its own investigation in September 2021, said the alleged misconduct had broader implications for customers and the wider financial industry.
“A culture of silence in which allegations of misconduct are not dealt with effectively can put consumers and markets at risk,” Therese Chambers, the joint executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said. “Mr Odey repeatedly sought to evade and obstruct efforts to hold him to account. His lack of integrity means he deserves to be banned from the industry.”
The FCA notified Odey that it planned to take action against him in November. It said it believed he had breached the regulator’s code of conduct, which “required him to act with integrity”, between December 2021 and November 2022.
During that time, it said Odey had used his majority shareholding in OAM to get rid of the existing members of its executive committee, weeks before he was due to appear for a disciplinary hearing over sexual harassment allegations in January 2022.
It came after the board said it was making contingency plans to replace him in case he was dismissed, as new harassment allegations against Odey emerged.
Then, as the sole member of the executive committee, Odey decided to indefinitely postpone the misconduct hearing, saying he was unable to conduct it with impartiality, the FCA said.
Odey appointed a new executive board in January 2022, but fired them by March, as they tried to institute safeguarding measures meant to protect female staff. That included having Odey work remotely, or be separated from staff within OAM’s offices.
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The hedge fund manager resisted, allegedly calling one board member “spineless”, and saying that HR law “did not matter here”, before again installing himself as its sole member, the FCA decision notice said.
He is also alleged to have put pressure on the FCA to postpone OAM’s internal disciplinary process pending the outcome of its own investigation. When the FCA did not agree, he told an FCA official in February 2022: “You will not get away with this. I have an agreement then you little guys, trying to do your work in the shadows. You are about to create a crisis … I will walk and leave you to clean up the mess,” according to the FCA decision notice.
Three more members were added to the board before the company finally conducted a disciplinary hearing in November 2022, nearly a year later than originally planned.
The FCA said Odey had shown “reckless disregard” for the hedge fund’s governance, “causing OAM to breach certain regulatory requirements”.
Odey launched a £79m libel lawsuit against the Financial Times in December, saying he suffered “very significant financial loss” because of the articles alleging he had sexually assaulted or harassed multiple women.
He was also seen entering a courtroom last week to speak to lawyers working for the former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley, who is trying to overturn his own ban from the City over claims he lied about the depth of his relationship with the US paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Odey has been approached for comment.
