Crispin Odey urged woman he groped at work to downplay incident to FCA

afr.com:

London | Crispin Odey urged a woman he groped at the headquarters of his hedge fund to downplay the incident to the financial watchdog while it considered whether he should retain his regulatory approval as a “fit and proper person”.

The woman, who is the 20th to come forward to the Financial Times with claims of sexual misconduct against the financier, said she was assaulted by Mr Odey in 2005 when she was an employee at his hedge fund firm. She told Odey Asset Management’s longstanding lawyers about the incident during an internal inquiry in 2021, the findings of which were also shared with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Crispin Odey at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2021. Bloomberg

The former employee told a lawyer at Simmons & Simmons that a “culture of fairly prolific sexual harassment” from Mr Odey prevailed at his firm, according to documents seen by the FT.

In Mr Odey’s first admission of sexual misconduct against any of the 20 women who have made allegations against him, he told the FT: “The girl concerned did work for me in 2005, and I did grab her breasts and it was reported and investigated . . . I had just come back from having two hours [of] canal root fillings and was under heavy medication.”

The woman’s testimony given to Simmons raises further questions over what information the law firm included in its report, and why the FCA continued to view Mr Odey as “fit and proper”.

Her account further suggests a culture of complicity at the firm where Mr Odey’s abusive behaviour towards women appears to have been widely tolerated.

The FT’s previous reporting detailed that he allegedly sexually harassed or assaulted 19 other women between 1985 and 2021. Of these, 12 were employees of the firm. In 2021,