Woodford's £3.7B fund froze — six years later the FCA fined him £46M

The Woodford Equity Income Fund opened with a 16% first year, beating all 50 peers it was tracked against, and peaked at £10.1 billion in May 2017. The portfolio kept moving down the liquidity curve: the allocation to micro-, small- and mid-cap stocks rose from 40% in January 2016 to almost 97% by the end of May 2019. When withdrawals came, only 8% of the fund's investments could have been sold within seven days — against a rule requiring investors to have access to their money within four.

The suspension landed in June 2019, trapping about £3.7 billion of investor money, a large share of it pledged by a single client, St. James's Place. On 15 October 2019 the fund's administrator, Link Fund Solutions, shut the fund rather than reopen it and removed Woodford with immediate effect; BlackRock was hired to prepare the portfolio for wind-down, with distributions to begin in January 2020.

Six years on, the regulator's bill arrived. On 6 August 2025 the FCA fined Woodford Investment Management £40 million and Neil Woodford £5.89 million — £46 million in total — for 'unreasonable and inappropriate investment decisions' between July 2018 and June 2019, including selling the fund's liquid assets while buying illiquid ones as withdrawals mounted. Woodford was banned from senior management and from managing retail funds; the ruling was provisional, and his firm disputed it, blaming the losses on Link's fire sale of the assets.