The City's Open Secret: Crispin Odey and the Hedge Fund That Looked Away

The City of London - where power and impunity intersect. Photo: Unsplash

The head of one of Britain's most storied hedge funds sat in a tribunal room in London this week and called his former boss a "sex pest." He said it under oath. He said it on the record. And for anyone paying attention to the City of London's closed corridors, the only remarkable thing about the testimony was how long it took to get there.

Crispin Odey, 63, founder of Odey Asset Management - a firm that at its height controlled nearly nine billion pounds in assets - is currently fighting a lifetime ban imposed by the Financial Conduct Authority. The FCA stripped him of his authorization to work in UK financial services after an enforcement investigation triggered by a bombshell 2023 investigation from the Financial Times, which revealed that 13 women had made allegations of sexual misconduct against Odey spanning a period of 25 years.

The tribunal, which opened in February 2026, is supposed to be Odey's vehicle for rehabilitation. He claims the FCA acted with "animus" - a loaded legal term suggesting institutional bias rather than proper due process. His legal team argues the regulator had its mind made up before the evidence was gathered.

But this week, the testimony being entered into the public record is doing his case no favors. And the deeper one looks at how Odey Asset Management operated - and how the wider City of London ecosystem responded to warning signs over decades - the more this case looks like less a story about regulatory overreach and more a story about how financial power enables impunity.

Financial markets project competence and accountability. Inside the institutions, the rules often ran differently. Photo: Unsplash

I. The Machine Odey Built

Crispin Odey launched Odey Asset Management in 1991 from a small office in Mayfair. He was already a known quantity in the City - opinionated, confrontational, and gifted at shorting stocks that the consensus had wrong. His reputation rested on bets against companies others loved: retailers, banks, media conglomerates. He shorted Northern Rock before its 2007 collapse. He made enormous sums betting against a complacent market.

The fund's growth through the 1990s and 2000s reflected a particular strain of City culture: concentrated bets, high conviction, and a tolerance for eccentricity in exchange for returns. Odey kept pigs at his Somerset farm. He wore Wellington boots to client meetings. He gave rambling speeches about monetary policy, Brexit, and the coming financial reckoning. He was, in the language of the City, a "character."

By 2014, Odey Asset Management managed roughly 13 billion dollars at its peak. Partners grew wealthy. Clients stayed loyal through losing years because the brand promised contrarian genius. Odey himself was married to Nichola Pease, daughter of one of Britain's most respected City families. The social scaffolding around the firm was formidable.

And inside that scaffolding, by the accounts of the women who would later come forward, something else was operating entirely.

"The financial sector is often a closed world. Victims of misconduct fear retaliation, fear not being believed, fear the loss of careers in an industry where the powerful control the references." - Gina Martin, women's rights advocate, speaking in 2023 context of City misconduct investigations

The FT's 2023 investigation - one of the most consequential pieces of financial accountability journalism published in Britain in years - revealed that 13 women had alleged sexual misconduct by Odey. The allegations ranged from inappropriate touching to assault. The period covered spanned from the mid-1990s to the early 2020s. The women who went on record did so at significant personal and professional risk. Several had never told their stories publicly before.

What made the story particularly damaging was not just the number of accusers or the timeline. It was the institutional context. Multiple sources told the FT that Odey's behavior was known - at least in outline - within City circles for years. Allegations were whispered. Stories circulated. And nothing happened, for decades, until a newspaper finally put it all together in one place.

II. The Criminal Trial That Wasn't Enough

Long before the FT investigation, Odey had faced a criminal proceeding. In 2021, he stood trial at Southwark Crown Court on a charge of indecent assault relating to an incident alleged to have occurred in 1998. The complainant was a French finance professional named Genevieve Bougeret, who had worked in London at the time.

Odey was acquitted. His legal team argued the allegations were false, motivated by malice, and unsupported by evidence sufficient to meet the criminal standard of proof. The jury found him not guilty.

The acquittal became a central plank of Odey's subsequent public defense. His argument, in essence, was that the judicial process had already addressed these claims and found them wanting. When the FT investigation later surfaced additional accusers, Odey invoked his criminal acquittal as proof of the broader accusations' unreliability.

But the law does not work this way. A "not guilty" verdict in a criminal trial establishes only that the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt - the highest evidentiary standard in the legal system. It does not mean the events did not occur. It does not render all subsequent allegations fabricated. And it has no bearing on the FCA's parallel jurisdiction over whether someone is a "fit and proper person" to hold regulatory approval in financial services.

This distinction matters enormously. The FCA's test is not criminal guilt. It is a conduct and character assessment under a different legal framework, operating at a different standard of proof. When the FCA opened its enforcement investigation following the 2023 allegations, it was not retrying Odey for assault. It was asking whether someone with his alleged pattern of behavior should remain authorized to work in a regulated industry.

"An acquittal means the prosecution didn't prove its case. It doesn't mean the conduct didn't happen. Regulatory fit-and-proper assessments operate on entirely different principles." - Financial regulation barrister, speaking anonymously about FCA enforcement standards

After the 2023 FT investigation, Odey reached an interim agreement with the FCA to voluntarily refrain from seeking regulatory approval while the investigation was ongoing. In late 2025, the FCA issued its formal decision: a lifetime ban. Odey was not fit and proper to be authorized in UK financial services.

Odey chose to fight it.

The FCA tribunal represents one of the City's most consequential accountability hearings in years. Photo: Unsplash

III. The Tribunal and the "Animus" Argument

When Odey launched his challenge to the lifetime ban, his legal strategy contained a provocative thesis: that the Financial Conduct Authority had approached his case with predetermined conclusions, acting not as a neutral regulator applying the law but as an institution motivated by external pressure - from media coverage, from political pressure, from a desire to demonstrate post-MeToo relevance.

In the legal terminology of regulatory proceedings, this is called challenging "animus." It is an argument that the decision-maker was biased - that the process was compromised before it began. It is a serious allegation to level at a statutory body. And in February 2026, a preliminary tribunal ruling cleared Odey to make exactly this argument at the full hearing.

The FT reported that the tribunal found sufficient grounds to allow Odey to put the FCA's alleged "animus" on trial - meaning the regulator's own conduct and decision-making process will come under scrutiny alongside Odey's alleged misconduct. This is a significant procedural victory for Odey's legal team, if a limited one. Winning the right to make an argument is not the same as winning the argument.

The substantive hearing began in early March 2026. And immediately, the testimony entering the public record ran contrary to Odey's preferred narrative.

On March 10, 2026, the Guardian reported that the head of Odey Asset Management - one of Odey's former most senior colleagues - described him in court as a "sex pest." The Reuters wire added that the hearing featured testimony about Odey's conduct that went to the heart of the FCA's case: that his behavior was not an isolated aberration but a persistent, known pattern within the firm itself.

The significance of this testimony cannot be overstated. Odey's case rests substantially on arguing that the FCA's picture of him was assembled from unreliable sources, driven by media pressure rather than sober evidence. But when the people who worked most closely with him - who built their careers alongside his, who shared offices and clients and reputational stakes with him - use words like "sex pest" under oath in a public tribunal, that argument becomes exponentially harder to sustain.

IV. The Culture That Made This Possible

The Odey case cannot be understood in isolation. It is a product of a specific institutional culture that operated in the City of London for decades - and which, in important respects, continues to operate today.

Britain's hedge fund and private equity industries are among the most opaque corners of global finance. They are lightly regulated by design. Their performance is private. Their internal governance is minimal. Their partners are bound by confidentiality agreements and mutual financial interest. And they are overwhelmingly male - particularly at the senior levels where the real decisions are made.

In this environment, behavioral norms that would trigger immediate consequences in, say, a listed company or a public institution can persist for extraordinary periods. There is no shareholder to complain to. There is no annual report. There is no external audit of conduct. The only meaningful check is whether the people inside the firm choose to act - and in Odey's case, for decades, they did not.

The FT's investigation revealed that multiple people within the industry knew, or had heard, about Odey's behavior. Some had received direct complaints. Some had observed incidents. The knowledge, in other words, was not tightly held. It circulated. And it did not produce action because the mechanisms that might have forced action - HR processes, regulatory reporting obligations, legal consequences - were either absent, weak, or actively circumvented.

Parliament has attempted to address some of these gaps. The FCA introduced the Senior Managers and Certification Regime in 2019, which placed explicit conduct obligations on senior financial services professionals and created new duties to report concerns about colleagues. In theory, this regime would have made it harder for someone in Odey's position to operate as the FT described without triggering regulatory scrutiny.

But the regime only applies prospectively. It cannot retroactively assign liability for conduct that preceded its implementation. And even under the new framework, the culture of protecting high performers through silence persists.

V. The Brexit Dimension

Any honest account of Crispin Odey requires engaging with his political connections - because they illuminate why the City's protective instincts ran so deep for so long.

Odey was one of the most prominent financial backers of the Brexit referendum campaign. He donated to Vote Leave and made his support for Leave visible and vocal at a time when most of the City establishment was aligned with Remain. When the Leave vote came in on June 24, 2016, Odey reportedly described himself as "dancing in the street" - and his firm made an estimated 220 million pounds from bets on the pound's collapse.

Brexit gave Odey political connections that transcended normal City influence. He was not merely a wealthy hedge fund manager. He was a figure associated with the political movement that had reshaped British politics. He had proximity to politicians who owed their careers partly to the campaign he funded. He attended high-profile political events. He was quoted as an authority on financial markets and monetary policy by outlets that would not have given space to an unknown fund manager.

This is not, to be clear, a suggestion that Brexit is causally connected to Odey's alleged sexual misconduct. It is an observation about the layers of protection that wealth and political connection provide to powerful men. The more embedded someone is in the network of influence, the higher the cost for anyone who challenges them - and the more institutions have to lose by exposing them.

"Political connections don't just buy favors. They buy silence. They buy the benefit of the doubt. They buy the willingness of institutions to look the other way when looking the other way is easier than acting." - Academic writing on political corruption, applicable to private sector dynamics

Odey's wealth also gave him legal resources that most people facing regulatory proceedings cannot access. His FCA challenge is being run by a team of specialist barristers. The "animus" argument - sophisticated, procedurally clever, designed to shift scrutiny from his conduct to the regulator's process - is the product of serious legal investment. It does not change the underlying facts. But it shapes how those facts are contested.

When wealth, political connections, and institutional silence align, accountability becomes an uphill battle. Photo: Unsplash

VI. Timeline of a Cover-Up

VII. What the Tribunal Will Actually Decide

The Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery Chamber) is not a criminal court. It cannot punish Odey for assault. It is not in the business of making findings of sexual misconduct in the criminal sense. What it will decide is narrower but still consequential: whether the FCA's decision to impose a lifetime ban was lawfully made, properly evidenced, and proportionate.

If Odey wins, he could - in theory - return to regulated financial services. Given his age and the reputational damage already done, this seems an unlikely path back to managing a major hedge fund. But the legal victory would have symbolic significance: it would represent a finding that the FCA's process was flawed, which would fuel arguments about regulatory overreach in other cases.

If the FCA wins, the lifetime ban stands. It would represent a significant precedent: that a pattern of alleged sexual misconduct, documented across multiple complainants over decades, meets the threshold for permanent exclusion from regulated financial services under the "fit and proper person" standard. This precedent would matter well beyond Odey's individual case.

The "animus" argument is the most legally interesting element of the proceedings. Odey's team has argued that the FCA was influenced by media coverage - specifically the 2023 FT investigation - to reach conclusions it would not otherwise have reached, or to apply a standard it would not otherwise have applied. This argument essentially asks the tribunal to find that the FCA was performing accountability theatre for public consumption rather than conducting genuine regulatory analysis.

This is a hard argument to win. Regulators are entitled to respond to media investigations that surface credible evidence of misconduct. The fact that a journalist uncovered something does not make the FCA's subsequent investigation illegitimate. And "animus" in law requires more than showing that the decision-maker was aware of the allegations before forming a view - it requires showing that the awareness corrupted the process.

The testimony of Odey's own former colleagues - describing him as a "sex pest" under oath - substantially weakens the argument that the FCA's conclusions rested on shaky external foundations rather than substantive evidence.

VIII. The Broader Reckoning in UK Financial Services

The Odey case does not stand alone. It arrives during a period of genuine, if uneven, reckoning across the City of London about the conduct of powerful men and the institutional cultures that protected them.

The same week Odey's tribunal opened, other threads were active. The FCA has been under pressure to investigate Peter Mandelson - now serving as UK Ambassador to Washington - over allegations of potential insider trading during his earlier tenure. The allegations remain unproven, and Mandelson has denied wrongdoing. But the fact that the FCA is being asked to investigate someone at that level of political prominence reflects a broader shift in appetite for accountability.

Also in February 2026, it was reported that rape allegations against former Barclays CEO Jes Staley were raised during the US Epstein investigation - adding another layer to a financial industry #MeToo accounting that has been slower and quieter than its Hollywood equivalent.

Santander's car loan mis-selling bill hit 460 million pounds in early 2026, adding to a wider pattern of consumer finance firms being held retroactively accountable for practices that regulators tolerated or missed for years. The FCA itself is under political scrutiny for being too slow and too cautious - caught between accusations of regulatory overreach (from Odey and others like him) and accusations of regulatory neglect (from consumer advocates and politicians watching mis-selling scandals compound).

The FCA's ability to sustain its lifetime ban against Odey matters partly for this reason. If the tribunal overturns the ban on procedural grounds, it will embolden others to challenge regulatory conduct decisions through the same "animus" argument. The standard for challenging a "fit and proper" determination will effectively rise. And the next victim of a powerful City figure will face a marginally harder path to any form of accountability.

IX. What Comes Next

The tribunal is expected to continue for several weeks. The full scope of testimony - from Odey's former colleagues, from FCA investigators, and potentially from some of the women who made the original allegations - will take time to work through the proceedings.

Odey himself has maintained his denials consistently throughout. He has described the FCA's case as an "agenda" driven by political pressure rather than evidence. His legal team has framed the proceedings as a test of regulatory due process - asking whether the FCA followed proper procedure or was swept up in a media-driven panic.

But the testimony coming from his own former inner circle suggests a different picture. When the head of your hedge fund describes you as a "sex pest" in open court - not to a journalist, not in private, but under oath in a public tribunal - the argument that the FCA had to reach very far to find grounds for concern becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

The 13 women who spoke to the Financial Times did so at enormous personal and professional cost. Several feared career consequences in an industry where Odey's network ran deep. Several had kept their experiences private for years - in some cases decades - because they calculated that speaking out would cost them more than silence. The fact that a lifetime ban is now on the line in a public tribunal represents, for some of them, a form of accountability that was entirely absent for most of their professional lives.

Whether the tribunal ultimately upholds or overturns that ban, the record being created is permanent. The testimony being entered into the public domain - from Odey's colleagues, his lawyers, his former firm's leadership - will stand as a documented account of how the City of London's most successful hedge fund manager conducted himself, and how the institution around him responded, for three decades.

That record is damning. And it will not disappear, regardless of how the legal proceedings conclude.

"Crispin Odey was a sex pest." - Testimony entered at the Upper Tribunal, reported by the Guardian, March 10, 2026. Spoken by the head of Odey Asset Management.

X. The Cost of Silence

There is a final dimension to this story that deserves direct statement. For every year that Crispin Odey's alleged conduct was known in City circles without triggering action, there were women in financial services who absorbed the cost of that silence.

Some of them left the industry. Some stayed and managed around him - avoiding certain events, certain conferences, certain dinners. Some confided in colleagues who did nothing. Some made formal complaints internally that were quietly resolved through settlements with confidentiality clauses. Some said nothing at all, calculating that nothing would happen and that speaking would only hurt themselves.

The structure of British financial services - its opacity, its gentleman's-club culture, its tolerance for high-performing eccentrics, its labyrinthine confidentiality machinery - did not create Crispin Odey's alleged behavior. But it created the conditions under which that behavior could persist, largely uncontested, for the better part of three decades.

The FCA's lifetime ban is not a belated act of justice for those women - the legal system's capacity to provide justice for sexual misconduct in a regulatory context is genuinely limited. But it is an attempt to enforce a minimum standard of conduct for people who hold power over others in regulated environments. The tribunal's job is to determine whether that attempt was legitimate.

The City will be watching the outcome carefully. So will the 13 women who told their stories.

And so should everyone else who operates within institutions where power protects the powerful - and silence serves as the operating principle until it becomes too loud to sustain.