Pension Funds: Neil Woodford

pension funds: Q&A What is the Neil Woodford crisis Show Hide Who is Neil Woodford He was once the UK's biggest star fund manager, personally managing billions on behalf of pension funds and other investors at Invesco Perpetual, according to The Guardian. Then he decided to go it alone, and set up his own firm, Woodford Investment Management, in 2014. Peter Hargreaves who with Stephen Lansdown founded the Hargreaves Lansdown share-dealing service for private investors in 1981 added that the firm's clients had been stuffed into this horrible Woodford fund . The FTSE 100 company has come under fire for using its Wealth 50 list of recommended funds to promote Woodford's Equity Income fund, which blocked investors from withdrawing their cash in June after becoming overwhelmed by customer withdrawals following a series of bad market bets. Why has he shut his main fund The Woodford Equity Income Fund is Woodford's flagship fund, and it is understood it has several hundred thousand investors. The move gives him time to restructure the fund's portfolio and sell off some assets in order to raise cash to meet the likely flood of redemptions when the fund does eventually reopen. On 3 June he blocked investors from pulling their cash out of the fund after a dramatic jump in customer withdrawals after its performance went south following a series of bad stock market bets. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.