Investors trapped in Neil Woodford’s former flagship fund will share a payment of nearly £100m in mid-December.
In a letter published today (November 30), the fund’s administrator Link Fund Solutions told investors it had raised a further £98m in the latest sell-off of the portfolio’s assets and that investors would be paid their share on or around December 11.
The payments, which will be the fourth tranche of payouts made to investors since the fund was wound down, partly relate to the sale of a bundle of the fund’s healthcare assets to Acacia for £224m announced in June.
Under the transaction, the portfolio of assets sold are being individually transferred at different times, with the fund receiving the payment for specific assets when they have been moved over.
Investors have already received £183m from the transaction but Link is expected to receive the payment for the remaining assets — alongside other investments that potentially could be sold — in the coming days.
Link’s deal with Acacia was branded ‘undercut’ when the US-listed firm re-sold some of the assets for a higher figure, although Link has since defended the deal’s price tag.
The new payment will bring the total returned to clients since the end of October 2019 to £2.54bn. After this fourth round of payouts, some £186m will still be trapped in the fund.
Earlier this year investors were warned they could face a wait of up to a year to receive the entirety of their cash still sitting in the defunct portfolio.
In today’s letter, Link doubled down on the forecast and told investors it was expected that some of the remaining assets would not be sold until “mid to late 2021”.
It will continue to make capital distributions to investors as the fund's assets are sold.
The liquid assets in the portfolio were largely sold in January this year when £2.1bn, around 70 per cent of the portfolio, was returned to investors. As the illiquid investments have been slowly shifted, the payments have become smaller.
imogen.tew@ft.com
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