Crispin Odey's ban from the finance industry was confirmed on 14 September 2026, for conduct the regulator began investigating on 28 September 2021. By then his hedge fund, which held up to £2.8 billion of client money, had been dead for nearly three years.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
In short. On 14 September 2026 the Financial Conduct Authority announced that the Upper Tribunal had upheld its ban on Crispin Odey, founder of Odey Asset Management (OAM) [1]. The FCA's own decision notice records that it opened its investigation on 28 September 2021 [2], almost two years before the Financial Times exposure that made the firm's collapse public and permanent by October 2023 [3]. Three documented mistakes: four stars.
The ban, and what the release says about it
The FCA's press release is unambiguous about what it thinks happened. "Crispin Odey's ban from the financial services industry has been upheld by the Upper Tribunal, which found he lacked integrity" [1]. Odey was OAM's founder and majority owner; he faced internal discipline "for breaching a final written warning relating to repeated and persistent inappropriate behaviour towards female employees," and responded by twice dismissing OAM's executive committee when it would not drop the case [1].
Therese Chambers, the FCA's executive director of enforcement and market oversight, is quoted putting the finding in the sharpest terms available: "Mr Odey clearly thought he could act with impunity. He twice sacked those tasked with protecting female employees from his inappropriate behaviour when they tried to hold him to account. He felt the rules shouldn't apply to him and acted to save his own skin" [1]. The FCA's decision notice dates the Final Written Warning behind all this to 4 February 2021, signed by Odey the following day (page 2) [2].
Read on its own, the release describes a regulator that caught someone who thought he was untouchable. Read against its own supporting document, the timeline runs the other way: the FCA had a live, formal investigation into exactly this conduct for the better part of five years before the ban that resulted from it took effect.
The five-year gap the release does not mention
The decision notice, not the press release, supplies the dates. "On 28 September 2021, the Authority commenced investigations into the alleged non-financial misconduct of Mr Odey and into OAM's handling of the allegations against him" (page 2) [2]. Odey went on to remove OAM's executive committee twice, on 24 December 2021 and again on 31 March 2022, each time installing himself as its sole member to stop a disciplinary hearing into his own conduct going ahead (page 3) [2].
None of this was public. It surfaced only when the Financial Times reported, in June 2023, that OAM had been under FCA investigation for two years; the disclosure triggered the firm's commercial collapse within weeks, according to a trade-press account of the wind-down that followed [3]. OAM formally began winding down its remaining business on 31 October 2023, transferring its fund managers and funds to five other firms and closing the rest [4] [3]. The FCA's own decision notice records that OAM's authorisation itself ended on 24 May 2024 (page 6) [2]. The Warning Notice against Odey personally is dated 18 September 2024, four months after the firm he was accused of mismanaging had already ceased to exist as an authorised business (page 6) [2]. The Decision Notice itself followed on 3 March 2025 (page 1), and the Upper Tribunal did not hear the case until March and May 2026, more than four and a half years after the investigation began [5] [2].
By the time the ban that "means Mr Odey is unfit to work in financial services" [1] actually took legal effect, there had been no OAM for him to be unfit to work at for close to three years. The practical protection the ban is supposed to deliver, keeping Odey away from the firm and the industry he dominated, had already been delivered by the market and the press, not by the regulator's own process.
Billions of pounds, still open for new business
The decision notice also discloses what was happening to client money while the FCA's undisclosed investigation ran. OAM did not stop taking on new investors the day the investigation opened in September 2021. It kept marketing its funds for a further eight months, only notifying investors of the governance risk and ceasing to market to new investors in June 2022 (page 5) [2]. Across that period OAM held "around £2.555 billion and £2.836 billion of funds under management in December 2021 and March 2022 respectively" (page 5) [2]: a fund manager with a live FCA investigation into its founder's conduct and governance, still open to new client money in the billions, with none of that disclosed to the investors handing it over.
The claims, tested
| The claim | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Therese Chambers, FCA: "Mr Odey clearly thought he could act with impunity... acted to save his own skin" [1] | The FCA's own investigation into this exact conduct opened on 28 September 2021 (decision notice, page 2) [2]; the ban took legal effect only in September 2026, nearly three years after OAM had already collapsed commercially [3] | The finding of impunity is about Odey's conduct inside OAM, not the FCA's own pace; but the release lets a five-year regulatory process stand in for "held to account" when the market removed him from the industry years earlier |
| "The FCA's case against Mr Odey comprised of 5 allegations. The Tribunal fully upheld them all" [1] | The same release's notes to editors record that the Tribunal reduced the FCA's own proposed fine from £1.83 million to £1.53 million, rejecting the aggravating-factor uplift the FCA had applied [1] | "Fully upheld" is accurate for the five conduct allegations; it is not accurate for the financial penalty the FCA itself proposed, part of which the Tribunal did not uphold |
| OAM ceased marketing to new investors "in June 2022" once governance risks were identified (decision notice, page 5) [2] | Between the investigation opening (28 September 2021) and that decision, OAM held up to £2.836 billion of funds under management and continued to take on new client money (decision notice, page 5) [2] | The eight-month gap between a live FCA investigation and OAM restricting new business is on the FCA's own record; neither the decision notice nor the press release explains why new investors were not told sooner |
The mistakes, counted
The release presents the ban as accountability without disclosing that it arrived three years after the substance was already settled (1). OAM collapsed commercially in 2023 once press reporting made the FCA's own investigation public [3]; its FCA authorisation ended in May 2024 [2]. The September 2026 ban is real and enforceable, but it protects a market that had already removed Odey from it.
"Fully upheld" is applied to the whole case when it only covers the conduct allegations (2). The FCA's own release discloses, in its notes to editors, that the Tribunal cut its proposed fine by around £300,000 because it rejected part of the FCA's aggravating-factor calculation [1]. That is a partial loss for the FCA's case, filed under a headline claiming total vindication.
Billions of pounds of client money sat with a firm under live, undisclosed FCA investigation for eight months before OAM restricted new business (3). The decision notice's own figures show £2.555 billion to £2.836 billion under management while the investigation ran without public disclosure [2]; investors adding money to OAM's funds in that window had no way of knowing what the regulator already knew.
Credit where due
The FCA moved with some speed by its own standards: it opened a formal investigation seven months after OAM's internal Final Written Warning, not years later [2]. The decision notice records that the FCA warned OAM directly about the regulatory consequences after Odey's first removal of the executive committee, before he did it again (page 3) [2]. And the FCA pursued the case through a full contested Tribunal hearing running eleven days across March and May 2026, rather than settling for a lesser, quieter outcome [5]. The ban and the fine, even reduced, are a substantive result, not a token one.
Verdict
Four stars, from three documented mistakes. The Tribunal's findings against Odey are not in dispute here, and the FCA's press release is accurate about what he did. What it does not do is tell a reader that its own investigation into that conduct opened in September 2021, that OAM kept marketing to new investors for eight months afterwards with billions of pounds under management, or that the firm had already been dead for close to three years by the time this month's ban gave the regulator's process a public ending. The market and the press did the work first. This week's notice reads as though the FCA did.
Sources
- Upper Tribunal upholds Crispin Odey ban, Financial Conduct Authority, published 14 September 2026.
- Decision Notice: Robin Crispin William Odey, Financial Conduct Authority, dated 3 March 2025.
- Odey Asset Management to wind down, Financial Planning Today, published 31 October 2023.
- Odey Asset Management to shut down entire business, Investment International, published 31 October 2023.
- ROBIN CRISPIN ODEY v THE FINANCIAL CONDUCT AUTHORITY [2026] UKUT 00351 (TCC), Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery Chamber), published 14 September 2026.