40 Monday June 13 2022 | the times
Business
fund, had decided to wind down Equity
Income. Two smaller funds run by
Woodford have also passed to new
managers.
He has shunned the spotlight since
the collapse of his investment empire,
having given only one interview when
he announced WCM Partners and his
advisory role with Acacia. He declined
to comment last week.
Information about WCM Partners is
scant. Its website contains no informa-
tion other than a logo and a photograph
of waves crashing on to a shore. It
emerged last year that Woodford was
planning to work from Marlow Place, a
grade I listed Georgian building in
Buckinghamshire that offers serviced
offices, although when contacted byThree years on from the implosion of
Neil Woodford’s investment empire,
the shadow of the scandal-hit fund
manager still looms large over the City.
Last week two of his more calamitous
investments were thrust back into the
spotlight when it emerged that Ruther-
ford Health, a cancer care specialist,
was set to enter liquidation and that EveSleep, the troubled mattress retailer,
had put itself up for sale.
Their woes were announced days
after the third anniversary of the sus-
pension of Woodford’s main £3.7 billion
Equity Income Fund. And while not
every company backed by Woodford
through his eponymous investment
firm was a dud, the struggles faced byRutherford and Eve are a reminder that
too many ultimately proved to be poor
investments.
The result — the freezing of with-
drawals from the Equity Income Fund
and the subsequent implosion of his
wider Woodford Investment Manage-
ment business — has severely
tarnished the reputation of a man once
fêted as Britain’s most talented stock-
picker. More than 300,000 people are
estimated to have entrusted savings
with Equity Income and have suffered
losses in what has become one of the
investment industry’s biggest scandals.
They are still waiting to get money out
of the stricken fund.
A first attempt at a comeback by
Woodford, 62, in February last year
provoked fury among investors caught
up in the scandal. Since then, he has
said nothing in public about WCM
Partners, his new venture, and much of
what he has been doing remains
shrouded in mystery.
However, The Times understands
that this could soon change.
It is thought that Acacia Research, an
American investment group that
Woodford has been advising, is keen to
significantly expand its relationship
with the fallen fund manager. The
details of Acacia’s ambitions with
Woodford are unknown, but they are
believed to be focused on financing
British life sciences businesses. If the
pair proceed, it would represent the
most tangible progress yet in Wood-
ford’s attempt to rebuild his reputation.
He generated stellar returns for
investors during a 26-year career as a
fund manager at Invesco, which he left
in 2014 to set up the Oxfordshire-based
Woodford Investment Management.
This venture enjoyed early success,
with the Equity Income Fund swelling
to £10.2 billion by 2017 as retail investors
piled in hoping that he would repeat his
Invesco performance.
Instead, after a series of his invest-
ments went awry, the fund started to
shrink. In June 2019 it was frozen as the
redemptions threatened to overwhelm
the fund’s ability to raise the cash to
satisfy the withdrawals, a process com-
plicated by risky, hard-to-sell bets that
Woodford had made on unquoted com-
panies. Within months, Link Group,
the authorised corporate director of theFallen fund manager
looks to rekindle career
with US investment
group, Ben Martin and
Dominic Kennedy write
Life’s a beach for disgraced
stockpicker Neil Woodford
uses sensors within a building’s internal
plumbing systems to measure how
efficiently it is being run. As well as
detailing energy usage, SmartSense is
said to be able to alert managers to an
underperforming boiler, for example,
or can tell them when a bearing in a
pump should be replaced.
It has been designed to work in
offices, warehouses, data centres and
factories. In Asia and the Middle East,
its customers include Amazon, Fiat and
Honeywell, the American industrial
conglomerate.
It is expected that the government
will try to force commercial property
owners to get their buildings up to an
energy performance rating of B or
better by the end of the decade.
Analysis by Deloitte suggests that
80 per cent of London offices would fail
to meet those requirements.Football club boss senses an
opportunity with Ecolibrium
A company whose technology helps
businesses to run their buildings more
efficiently has raised $5 million from
backers, including the chairman of
Queens Park Rangers, ahead of its
launch in Britain.
Ecolibrium, started by two brothers
in Ahmedabad, in India, in 2008, com-
pleted its latest fundraising last month,
with Swordfish, the investment vehicle
of Amit Bhatia, the QPR chairman,
leading the way. Unbound, the venture
capital firm of Shravin Bharti Mittal,
the son of one of India’s richest men,
also invested.
The company, which is trying to tap
into the rush to net zero, will use the
money to fund its launch in the UK,
where it has now relocated.
Ecolibrium’s SmartSense technologyTom Howard