Hedge fund billionaire Crispin Odey’s fall from grace
James Warrington, Tom Saunders and Louis Goss
Stooped about the witness box, Crispin Odey was barely audible as he was cross-examined by a lawyer for the City watchdog.
The normally ebullient hedge fund boss, 67, was giving evidence as part of his attempt to overturn a lifetime ban from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
The hearing earlier this year focused on an arcane section of the watchdog’s rule book: whether Odey – who twice fired his executive committee before it could discipline him about allegations he “lacked integrity” – acted “recklessly” and breached its rules.
But everyone in the room knew the subtext to the proceedings: the hedge fund tycoon’s history of alleged sexual misconduct stretching back decades.
Perhaps it was the toxicity of these allegations that made Odey vacillate between proud and evasive when answering questions from the FCA’s chief counsel, Clare Sibson, KC.
Asked later by the judge why he chose to close Odey Asset Management (OAM), his eponymous hedge fund, instead of trying to sell his stake, he responded: “I am a proud man.”
‘Mr Odey’s only purpose was self-preservation and to avoid being held to account for his behaviour.’
Financial Conduct Authority
This defiance pushed Odey into an expensive legal battle with the London City watchdog – one which cast fresh light on repeated allegations of sexual misconduct stretching back decades.
That battle ended in defeat for Odey on Monday. A court upheld a £1.53 million ($2.89 million) fine for the financier – reduced from an initial claim of £1.8 million – and a lifetime ban from financial services, ruling in favour of the City watchdog.
The Upper Tribunal, which decides on appeals against the FCA, ruled in its favour, finding Odey had deliberately worked to frustrate an internal investigation into misconduct allegations, while showing “reckless disregard” for City rules.
It said Odey had “repeatedly prioritised his own interests at the expense of risk of detriment to OAM, its staff members and investors” while seeing “nothing wrong with his approach”.
“Mr Odey’s only purpose was self-preservation and to avoid being held to account for his behaviour,” the FCA said.
For many observers, the spectacle of Odey in court laid bare the other side of a man once lauded as one of the “sharpest and most contrarian brains” in the City.
Who is Crispin Odey?
Odey was a rarity among his secretive hedge fund peers, enjoying an outsized and flamboyant public persona.
Born to Yorkshire industrialists, Odey was educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history and economics.
After graduating, Odey was handed control of the 4000-acre (1619-hectare) Hotham Hall estate that had been in his family for centuries, but soon sold everything off to settle his father’s substantial debts.
After entering the City, he was briefly married to Rupert Murdoch’s eldest daughter, Prudence, but the relationship only lasted 15 months before they divorced.
Then, in 1991, he married Nichola Pease, a fund manager whose family helped found Barclays, creating a power couple often called the “Posh and Becks” of the City. The same year, Odey set up his eponymous firm, with backing from early investors, including billionaire George Soros.
During the ensuing decades, Odey became one of London’s best-known hedge fund tycoons, in part because of his astute ability to cash in on chaos.
The hedge fund boss correctly predicted that the value of insurance companies would rise after 9/11, before pocketing £28 million in 2008 after successfully predicting the financial crisis.
The Brexit-backing financier gained further notoriety among political opponents in 2016 when he made £220 million by betting that markets would drop after the referendum result.
Odey has not been immune to failure. OAM, whose assets under management stood at $US13.3 billion at its peak in 2015, went through volatile shifts in fortune. One of his funds lost 44 per cent of its value in 1994.
Undoubtedly, though, Odey has done well out of his bets. His pay peaked at £36 million in 2010 and he and his wife were estimated to be worth £775 million in 2019.
In addition to his own fund, Odey held a significant stake in Sky, which he cashed in after its $US39 billion takeover by Comcast.
Odey, who in 2010 threatened to leave the UK in protest against high tax rates, has complemented his financial gains with forays into politics. He made political donations valued at £1.7 million between 2007 and 2019.
Some went to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. More recently he donated to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. The majority of his donations were channelled into groups campaigning for Brexit.
Odey also captured the imagination with his wholehearted embrace of the rarefied world of Mayfair high finance.
More than 1.80 metres tall and of ample build, Odey strikes an imposing figure.
Known for his trademark City uniform of red braces, the financier has also been described as a “country gent”, whose passion for enriching himself was rivalled only by his enthusiasm for country pursuits, such as hunting and fishing.
Nor has he shied away from displays of extravagance. He spent more than £130,000 building a Palladian-style chicken coop in 2012, nicknamed “Cluckingham Palace” by the tabloids, at his Gloucestershire estate, Eastbach Court.
The financier, who has a sausage named after him, was also notorious for his prodigious appetite. At one midweek meal with a journalist, he paired steak and kidney pudding and mash with a “side order” of a loin of beef and two bottles of wine.
Odey’s larger-than-life personality contrasted with allegations of a more menacing side. Media reporting and the lengthy dispute with the City watchdog have detailed incidents in which women were allegedly sexually assaulted. In one case, a woman accused him of rape, which he strenuously denied.
His reputation earned him the nickname “the octopus”.
The allegations first emerged publicly in 2020, when Odey was charged with indecent assault on a woman in 1998 after she accused him of groping her in his Chelsea home.
The trial, which came after the “Me Too” movement, gained significant publicity, with the hedge fund chief pictured leaving court clad in a mask and flanked by his wife.
‘Maybe I am a dinosaur; I cannot see how any of that can be sexual harassment.’
Crispin Odey
Odey admitted propositioning the woman, then 26, but denied assault. He was acquitted in 2021, with the judge ruling there were “inconsistencies” in the woman’s account.
Two years later, Tortoise Media and the Financial Times published investigations outlining allegations that Odey sexually harassed or assaulted 13 women over 25 years.
Odey settled civil claims from five women in May, weeks before they were to be heard in court.
The lawsuits include allegations that Odey raped a woman in the mid-1990s, an accusation he called “wholly false”.
Odey also mounted a £79 million defamation claim against the Financial Times, but dropped it in April.
The consequences have already rippled through Odey’s private life.
He and Pease, who have three children together, divorced soon after his court case in 2021. Odey has since remarried Diana Vitkova, a Bulgarian-born finance executive 26 years his junior.
Meanwhile, OAM collapsed in 2023 as major banks cut ties and investors pulled their money, forcing the company to start winding down its funds.
‘Playing the victim’
Odey mounted his challenge against the FCA ruling earlier this year, seemingly in an attempt to cling on to what might have remained of his status within the industry.
Yet the hearings in the Upper Tribunal did little to repair his reputation, particularly after he failed to have the sexual harassment claims excluded from the case.
By the end of the hearings, the FCA’s lawyers had accused Odey of submitting “false evidence” to the court and a “brazen” attempt to create a “false history” of events.
“Mr Odey displayed a remarkable absence of self-awareness, was evasive, inconsistent, and had a tendency to attack others whilst playing the victim,” the regulator argued in submissions to the court.
Witness statements paint a picture of a working environment controlled by a domineering and at times abusive boss.
Odey Asset Management, which was based in a five-storey Georgian townhouse in Mayfair, operated much like a feudal state, with Odey controlling 75 per cent of the fund. He had a reputation for reportedly hiring “earls and girls”, with women hired usually only as receptionists.
The court heard claims that OAM was an “old boys’ club”, with documents suggesting that executives at the firm had “very similar backgrounds” to Odey.
For a string of women at the firm, however, it went far further than a gender imbalance.
OAM commissioned law firm Simmons & Simmons to carry out an investigation in 2020 into its founder’s conduct. The resulting report detailed at least 46 misconduct claims against Odey dating back to 2003.
The court heard one incident in which it was claimed Odey gave a female employee a massage before “groping her breasts”. He was then accused of trying to manipulate the woman “into silence”. The hedge fund boss has blamed his actions on a dental sedative he took earlier that day.
Yet this incident was described as part of a culture of “prolific sexual harassment” at OAM. As one of his former employees testified, Odey was a “sex pest” who found it “hard to control himself” around women.
On the stand, Odey acknowledged staff thought he was a “creepy old man” but defended his behaviour with female subordinates. “Maybe I am a dinosaur; I cannot see how any of that can be sexual harassment,” he said.
‘Evidence of gross misconduct’
After the damning internal report was published in 2021, OAM’s executive committee issued a final written warning to Odey regarding his behaviour. The court heard that it cut Odey’s pay by 40 per cent, after pressure from the FCA.
It also banned him from physical contact with other staff members, excluding handshaking, and inviting or accompanying any female members of staff to events or shopping trips or contacting them by text or email.
That summer a new allegation surfaced after Odey told a receptionist she should “take a lover”, the court heard, and then accidentally showed her an indecent photo of his girlfriend while sharing pictures from a fishing trip.
The executive committee scheduled a disciplinary hearing in November to consider whether Odey had breached its final warning. But Odey acted first. On Christmas Eve, the tycoon sacked the entire committee – a move described by one witness as the “nuclear option”.
Odey subsequently decided that the disciplinary hearing into his conduct would be indefinitely postponed. He appointed new committee members, but after disagreement about how to proceed with the hearing, he sacked this board as well.
Some of Odey’s former employees tell a story of bullying. Thomas Richards, OAM’s former chief operating officer and a member of the committee, said the hedge fund boss had called him “f—ing spineless” and threatened to shut down the fund.
Another executive said he felt “physically threatened” by Odey after recommending he work from home or take a sabbatical. Jack Satt, the firm’s compliance chief who resigned in the wake of the scandal, said Odey offered him £1 million and a future role as chief executive if he stayed on.
There was no doubting Odey was a force to be reckoned with. The hedge fund tycoon even took an aggressive approach towards the FCA itself, at one point threatening to “go straight to the f—ing press”.
For now, the City watchdog triumphed. The tribunal ruled against Odey, upholding all five of the FCA’s allegations against the hedge fund manager, including that he threatened the watchdog’s staff.
He has two weeks to file a further appeal.
Instead of restoring his reputation, Odey’s appeals have only caused a deluge of allegations to resurface.
Therese Chambers, the FCA’s executive director of enforcement, said: “During the hearing he reinvented history, painted himself as a victim and displayed no contrition.
“That arrogant entitlement and the resulting complete disregard for proper governance means Mr Odey is unfit to work in financial services.”
And, despite Odey’s claims to the contrary, it is a crisis entirely of his own making.
