“The trouble is everyone just thinks about Woodford. I didn’t know about Link’s responsibility…the fact that Link was involved in other mis-selling and mismanagement scandals beggars belief.”
The Sunday Times, August 2020
HARCUS PARKER IS BRINGING CLAIMS ON BEHALF OF INVESTORS IN THE LF EQUITY INCOME FUND (FORMERLY WOODFORD EQUITY INCOME FUND (‘THE WOODFORD FUND’).
Link, as the Authorised Corporate Director of the Woodford Funds, has made millions in fees charged for adopting responsibility for safeguarding investors and ensuring that the Woodford Fund follows the rules. Our clients will allege that it failed adequately to supervise the Woodford Funds. This failure has proved to be catastrophic to those who invested their savings into the Woodford Fund and whose investments were locked into the Woodford Fund at suspension.
As Mark Carney has said, funds of this sort are built on a lie. Investors believe that they can withdraw their money whenever they choose. The management of the Woodford Fund made this practically impossible. Over a year on from the suspension of the Woodford Fund, no one has been held to account for this failure of management.
We have previously brought claims against Link (or Capita Financial Managers as it then was) for similar failures to manage the Arch cru funds.
Can I join?
Anyone who held shares in the Woodford Fund after the suspension of trading on 3 July 2019 is eligible to join the claim. That includes shareholders who owned shares through a platform provider, such as Hargreaves Lansdown or Interactive Investor (among many others).
The Arch Cru Link?
The Arch cru investment scandal was described in 2012 by Jeff Prestridge, the respected personal finance editor of the Mail on Sunday, as ‘probably the most damaging affair to hit the retail investment fund management industry since 1996, when Morgan Grenfell fund manager Peter Young was found to have defrauded investors’.
At our previous firm, Harcus Sinclair, the Harcus Parker team acted for investors who chose not to accept a payment from a redress scheme established by the FCA and instead elected to sue Capita Financial Managers for alleged breaches of its duties as ACD.
As has recently been pointed out by Ali Hussain in The Sunday Times there are many echoes of the Arch cru scandal in the Woodford affair. Not the least of these is the identity of the Authorised Corporate Director. The ACD of Arch cru was Capita Financial Managers. In November 2017, Link Administration Holdings Limited completed its purchase of Capita Financial Managers and the other companies which were part of the Capita Asset Services division and retained key senior directors such as the Chief Executive and the Managing Director Karl Midl, in whose name most of the correspondence to Woodford Investors on behalf of the Woodford Fund has been sent.
The problems that arose in the Arch cru funds were, though not identical, similar, in that there were serious issues with liquidity which caused the Arch cru funds to be suspended by the FCA, and with the valuation of the underlying assets.