Crispin Odey has spent much of the past week trying to convince a London court he was the main “victim” in the collapse of his hedge fund, blaming almost everyone else for its downfall, including the regulator and his former executives.
The only person the 67-year-old financier seems to consider largely blameless is himself, despite having been the subject of more than 46 sexual harassment allegations by female staff, as well as accusations aired in court of falsifying company minutes, misleading investors, blackmailing the regulator, bullying colleagues and trying to silence victims.
Even by his own evidence, he admitted that his behaviour risked him coming across as a “creepy old man” at the now-defunct hedge fund he founded, Odey Asset Management.
Odey attended every day of the three-week hearing, often arriving at London’s Rolls Building on an e-bike wearing a blue suit, pink tie and his signature braces, in his quest to overturn a £1.8mn fine and ban imposed by the Financial Conduct Authority last year.
Asked by Clare Sibson KC, a lawyer for the FCA, if he had been “bullying” his own executives not to take measures to protect his own female staff, he rejected this, saying: “I never thought I had sexually harassed anyone with the exception of one person”.
But the regulator showed the court lurid details of numerous complaints about Odey’s allegedly inappropriate behaviour towards receptionists and other female colleagues at Mayfair-based OAM, which he founded in 1991.
Odey admitted in court to groping the breasts of a female colleague when they were alone in the office in 2005.
But he told the court the woman had “accepted my apology” and “obviously took it no further”. He added he had been under the influence of a dental sedative at the time.
The woman continued working there for a number of years, mostly in a different office to Odey, the court heard. She later said he apologised and backed off after she screamed.
About half of the 46 allegations against him came from two receptionists in their 20s who worked for his hedge fund. One of them, who Odey called “an attractive girl”, was allegedly cornered in a corridor by him after a boozy lunch as he said “I could attack you now”, according to an extract of her diary read out in court. The second receptionist was dismissed as “frumpy” by Odey, who regularly urged her to buy “better” clothes and offered to take her shopping.
In his witness statement, Odey expressed some sense of remorse, saying he was “embarrassed by the allegations”. He said: “It was clear to me that I got things wrong. It was not right that members of staff felt uncomfortable because of my behaviour.”
Yet he often struck a different tone under cross-examination this week.
“I was the one who was the victim in this,” he told the court, after being asked why he behaved aggressively in a call with the FCA shortly after firing his executive board on the first of two occasions to stop them holding a disciplinary hearing into the sexual harassment allegations.
He told the court that when flirting with receptionists, giving them shoulder massages and inviting them for lunch, he was “just making them comfortable”. Describing himself as a “dinosaur”, he said: “One of the inappropriate things was to believe that a 25-year-old was at all interested in a 60-year-old man. That was an old man’s dream, a silly one.”
Sibson accused Odey of trying to “manipulate into silence” the victim of his 2005 assault, which he denied after being shown a text message he sent her warning that the FCA was “pursuing a vendetta” against his company and himself.
A former Conservative Party donor and Brexit supporter who made his name betting against British banks in the 2008 financial crash, Odey fell from grace after the FT detailed allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against him by a number of women who worked for OAM or had social or professional dealings with him.
Five women have brought personal injury claims against him in a trial due to start in June. Odey denies the claims and has brought a libel action against the FT over its reporting.
During the tribunal hearing, Odey showed flashes of humour, prompting laughter in the court when asked if he thought it an insult to tell an FCA official “you speak like a lawyer” and he responded: “Great insult.”
But the court heard evidence from former colleagues of Odey’s temper.
“I was in the middle of righteous indignation,” he said when asked why he had insulted a regulator on a call, explaining that after building his company for 30 years, “the threat was not from the markets but from the regulators who I believed were supposed to be on my side”.
Former colleagues described how Odey would regularly threaten to close down the firm if they tried to oust him over the allegations. OAM’s former chief executive Timothy Pearey described him as a “sex pest” and a “sociopath” with a “real problem” in his attitude to women.
Odey countered that Pearey was “duplicitous” after he discussed plans with the regulator to create a new firm to take over OAM’s activities if Odey was ousted.
For the FCA, Odey’s legal challenge is a crucial test of its ability to hold executives to account for what many say continues to be a widespread culture of discrimination, bullying and harassment in many parts of the City of London.
A recent survey of more than 1,000 companies by the FCA showed a two-thirds rise in reports of non-financial misconduct across the UK financial sector, with 7.2 incidents being reported per 1,000 employees in 2023, up from 4.2 incidents in 2021.
The regulator did not take action against Odey over the sexual harassment allegations against him but rather how he allegedly behaved in their wake.
The nuance reflects the FCA’s difficulty in approaching such cases ever since the tribunal ruled it was wrong to ban a financial adviser in 2021 purely on the basis of his criminal conviction for sexually grooming a child.
The regulator has sought to strengthen its ability to act after announcing new rules last year for non-financial misconduct, including sexual harassment, which come into force in September.
But in the meantime, Odey’s case will hinge on the way he reacted to his firm’s attempts to discipline him in relation to the alleged misconduct towards female staff.
The three-person panel chaired by Justice Sir Nicholas Thompsell will have to decide if the FCA was right to conclude Odey was “reckless” in breaching its rules and demonstrated “a lack of integrity” in trying to frustrate executives’ attempts to investigate his behaviour.
Nathan Willmott, a partner in the dispute resolution practice of UK-based law firm Ashurst and who is not involved in the case, said: “While the facts of this case are truly exceptional, the case highlights the existential risks for firms if they fail to ensure that cultural and conduct issues are promptly investigated and dealt with appropriately.”
Odey claims he was forced to take radical actions to save his hedge fund, which he was convinced he would have been forced to shut down had executives ousted him under pressure from the regulator.
He accused the FCA of making him its “cause célèbre” in their push to tackle non-financial misconduct in the City of London in the wake of political calls to respond to the #MeToo movement.
He wrote in his witness statement: “I became, I fear, a poster boy for the authority’s agenda.”
Additional reporting by Alistair Gray in London