Buyer flips Woodford funds at £21m profit25 Jul 2020 10:18
Link Fund Solutions faces growing scrutiny of its handling of Neil Woodford’s crippled investment fund after it emerged that it sold a stake to an investor that immediately flipped it on for a £21 million profit.
Acacia Research Corporation last month agreed a £223.9 million deal to buy a portfolio of up to 19 healthcare and biotechnology stocks from the Equity Income Fund, which is being wound down by Link.
Stock market filings have shown since then that Acacia quickly sold on one of the investments it bought, in Midatech Pharma, for a £752,100 profit.
Now it has emerged that Acacia scored an even bigger windfall by offloading another stake that it bought from the stricken fund. An American regulatory filing shows that Acacia acquired about 9.1 million shares in Evofem Biosciences, a listed company in the United States, from Link for 23 cents a share on June 4. That was the date of the wider deal with Link and Evofem shares closed at $3.29 that day.
Acacia sold the stock on the same day for about $3.21 per share, netting a profit of approximately $27.2 million, according to another filing. The transactions were first reported by Citywire.
Mr Woodford, 60, was once considered to be Britain’s most successful fund manager. He set up Woodford Investment Management in 2014. The Equity Income Fund was its main vehicle.
A prolonged period of poor investment performance by the fund led to investors withdrawing their money. Link, the fund’s authorised corporate director, blocked withdrawals in June last year. It sacked Mr Woodford last October and is closing the fund. Its investments are being sold so that cash can be returned to the more than 300,000 trapped investors.
The California-based Acacia focuses on life sciences and technology patents. It declined to comment on the flipping of the Evofem stake. A Link spokeswoman declined to comment.
There were also reports yesterday that the Financial Conduct Authority is examining the role that Northern Trust played in the run-up to the failure of the Equity Income Fund. Northern Trust is the fund’s depositary, a wide-ranging role that includes ensuring that the vehicle sticks to rules. Northern Trust and the FCA declined to comment.