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Move comes after the group’s eponymous founder was accused in June of sexual assault

Odey Asset Management’s wealth business is to close and return assets to clients months after founder Crispin Odey was accused of sexual misconduct.

The wealth business is closing in both Guernsey and the UK, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Financial Conduct Authority, the UK regulator, said of the closure: “We are aware of Odey Wealth Management’s intention to wind down the business. We will work closely with the firm as it winds down, to ensure clients are treated fairly.” 

The decision to wind down the business comes after the FT published an investigation in June that included detailed allegations from 13 women of sexual assault and harassment by the firm’s eponymous founder.

The allegations triggered a tumultuous period for the hedge fund group, prompting it to suspend or shut certain funds and vacate its longstanding Mayfair office. Odey was ejected from the firm he founded three decades ago within days of the investigation being published.

Odey Wealth, which was launched in Guernsey in 2008 and opened its London office in 2010, provides investment advisory services to clients. It is part of the Odey Group, which also includes Odey Asset Management and Brook Asset Management. 

The subsidiary wrote to clients in June to say it was “considering several options” for the business as it dealt with the fallout from the allegations against its founder, which prompted many of its prime brokers to sever ties. 

In the same month, the FCA placed restrictions on Odey Wealth and its parent company, which included an obligation to submit details of its bank accounts to the regulator each week, and to seek regulatory approval for “extraordinary” payments above £20,000.

Odey has strenuously disputed the allegations from the 13 women. Since then, a further six women alleged they were sexually harassed or assaulted by the financier. He did not respond to requests for comment on these subsequent allegations.

Last month, Odey admitted for the first time an incident of sexual misconduct after the 20th woman to accuse him came forward alleging he groped her breasts in the office. Odey said the incident did occur but that it was an “aberration” he blamed on the after-effects of an anaesthetic he had been given that day at the dentist.

Veteran activist investor has increased Trian’s stake in US entertainment group since burying hatchet in February

Nelson Peltz, the billionaire founder of activist firm Trian Partners, has increased his stake in Disney and is set to revive a campaign for board seats at the US entertainment group.

Trian, which in February called off its fight against Disney, has in the past two months boosted its stake in the company to a position worth more than $2.5bn, making it one of its largest shareholders, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The firm is planning to request seats on the Disney board including one for Peltz, said the people. 

“Trian believes it’s now time to have a seat at the table,” one of the people said. Disney’s shares are “significantly undervalued” and the board needs to be “more focused, aligned and accountable”. 

New York-based Trian, which manages around $9bn, declined to comment. News of Peltz’s fresh push for board seats was first reported by the Wall Street journal.

Peltz called off his fight against Disney two months after Bob Iger returned as Disney chief executive and a day after the company unveiled a plan to cut 7,000 jobs and reinstate the dividend suspended during the pandemic. Trian had called Disney’s succession planning process “broken”, attacked cost inefficiencies in the streaming business, and criticised the group’s 2018 acquisition of 21st Century Fox.

Since February, however, Disney’s stock has declined by 25 per cent. Trian, which owned 6.4mn shares in August, now owns more than 30mn shares, the people said.

Peltz, known for his activist campaigns against Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Wendy’s, wants Disney to get overheads “in line” and have “a clear strategy going forward”, said one of the people familiar with the 81-year-old financier’s thinking.

Disney, like all the large streaming services, has been under pressure from investors to curtail profligate spending on TV and film content amid a slowdown in new subscribers numbers. Analysts have been concerned about “peak streaming” in markets such as the US.

Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming operations, which includes Disney+, made a large loss last year, and the company does not expect the business to return to profit until 2024. Disney+ subscriber numbers continued to fall last quarter, more than analysts had expected. The unit posted a rare quarterly loss due to one-off charges and impairments from taking content from its streaming platform and ending licensing agreements.

Recent blockbuster movies such as Little Mermaid have underwhelmed, while forthcoming releases have been hit by the writers and actors’ strikes in Hollywood.

Investors and analysts are also questioning whether the company should sell off some of its “crown jewel” assets, such as streaming service Hulu or sports network ESPN.

ESPN has been hit by cancellations of cable subscriptions, while rivals such as Apple are seeking to acquire rights to high profile sports to show alongside their entertainment content. Trian, however, does not want Disney to sell the sports network, the person familiar with Peltz’s thinking said.

Investors have also questioned the future of the Hulu streaming service, including whether Disney should buy out the one-third stake owned by Comcast as early as next year in a multibillion-dollar transaction.

Meanwhile, the company’s television business, still profitable, has also suffered, with demand eroded by online and streaming rivals as well as a sharp fall in advertising revenues.

Iger, 72, has said he would cut $5.5bn in costs, which has already translated into thousands of job losses. Disney has also committed to investing more in its parks, experiences and products division, which continues to grow.

Another big question concerns Iger himself. The entertainment veteran has extended his contract for another two years, raising doubts over his commitment to finding a successor. “The challenges are greater than I anticipated,” Iger told CNBC in July.

If Disney rejects Trian’s request for board seats, the activist would have the option to put forward its candidates for shareholder approval at its annual meeting next spring.

Rare step comes after Brussels fined US biotech for buying Grail without approval

EU regulators will order US biotech Illumina to sell cancer test developer Grail after it bought the $8bn company without the approval of Brussels, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The step is intended to deepen the punishment for Illumina after Brussels fined the world’s largest gene-sequencing company €432mn in July for defying what regulators described as a “cornerstone” of their authority.

New York-listed Illumina and Brussels have been locked in a legal fight since 2021 when the San Diego-based company completed the purchase of Grail even as EU regulators were still examining whether the deal would hurt competition.

Brussels chose to block the transaction a year later, saying it would stifle innovation and limit choice for consumers. Illumina had disputed the EU’s right to scrutinise the deal, pointing to the fact that Grail does not have any revenues in Europe. It completed the deal in August 2021.

Illumina is already challenging a similar order from the US Federal Trade Commission, which in April demanded the sale of Grail, saying the deal would hurt efforts to develop ways of detecting cancer. The company said it had a “strong case” to appeal the order.

An order from competition regulators in Brussels for Illumina to sell Grail could come as early as next week, the people said. But the timing could still slip, one of these people warned.

The move is a rare one for regulators to take and is designed to dissuade other companies from defying their authority. Under EU law companies must submit deals for scrutiny and can only close a transaction once it has been signed off by regulators.

“They bought something illegally and now they need to sell it,” said a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Illumina intends to appeal any order to sell Grail, according to people familiar with the matter. Illumina and the European Commission declined to comment.

The fine imposed on Illumina was equivalent to 10 per cent of its revenue — the largest penalty available to authorities for this type of infringement.

When it announced the fine, the commission said that Illumina had “considered the potential profits it could obtain by jumping the gun, even if it were ultimately forced to divest Grail. It then intentionally decided to proceed and to close the deal while the commission was still investigating the transaction that was ultimately prohibited.” 

Grail, which counted Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as early investors, is aiming to create a cancer screening test for people without symptoms. Illumina has accused Brussels of putting lives at risk by blocking a deal that aims to bring to market a blood test to screen dozens of different cancers.

The acquisition of Grail also angered some of Illumina’s shareholders. Activist investor Carl Icahn attacked the deal as reckless and pushed for the exit of Illumina’s longstanding chief executive Francis deSouza, who in June agreed to step down.

The investigation is examining whether Murtaza Lakhani, founder and chief executive of Mercantile & Maritime Group, traded Russian oil in breach of Western sanctions

The Justice Department is conducting a broad effort to crack down on violations of sanctions imposed on Russia’s energy exports and has homed in on the possible activities of a prominent oil trader.

The effort includes an investigation of Murtaza Lakhani, founder and chief executive of Mercantile & Maritime Group, a major oil trading and shipping company with head offices in Bahrain and Singapore. The probe is examining whether Lakhani traded Russian oil in breach of Western sanctions including a U.S.-led price cap, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investigation is ongoing. It couldn’t be determined whether any charges might result.

A spokesman for Lakhani didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. and its allies have looked for ways to beef up oil sanctions that industry executives say have lost some of their effect on Russian oil revenues. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the Justice Department set up the Task Force KleptoCapture unit last year to enforce policies intended to isolate the Russian economy, and to seize assets of sanctions violators.

Prices for Russia’s oil have risen far above the Western-imposed price cap in recent months, indicating that Russia has found new ways to profit from its oil sales. Western nations targeted Russian oil exports when designing sanctions because they are by far the biggest contributor to the Kremlin’s budget.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department in conjunction with the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department outlined a campaign of enforcement focused on bringing criminal charges against companies that served as intermediaries or used transshipments to evade Russian sanctions.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the government was likely to take steps to enforce the price cap, in a sign that the U.S. is readying a broader effort to crack down on suspected evasion of sanctions on Russian oil.

“We are looking at enforcement very carefully and we want to make sure that market participants are aware we take this price cap seriously and to the extent Western services are used we mean business about abiding by the cap,” Yellen said in an interview en route to the International Monetary Fund meetings in Morocco this week.

A person close to Rosneft Oil, the Russian state-backed energy giant, said the company is aware of a broad Justice Department probe into Russian oil shipments.

A Rosneft spokesman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department is examining whether Lakhani has a business relationship with Rosneft Chief Executive Igor Sechin, an ally of President Vladimir Putin, according to the people familiar with the matter. Sechin is personally sanctioned by the U.S.

Born in Pakistan and a citizen of Canada and Vanuatu, Lakhani is known in the oil world for operating in complicated places. He has facilitated trades of oil produced in Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan and Venezuela. Before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Lakhani had long done business with Rosneft, both inside and outside Russia.

A spokesman for Lakhani said in July that he and every company in which he has an interest were no longer involved in the Russian oil trade. The spokesman said Lakhani and his companies had undergone “a complete cessation of all trade in Russian oil” to comply with sanctions, including those imposed by the Group of Seven nations.

Lakhani appeared on camera in June at Putin’s flagship St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. He sat in the front row of the audience during a session headlined by Rosneft’s Sechin and applauded a speech in which the chief executive described the establishment of “new, secure logistical chains which provide one with access to new markets.”

The spokesman said in July that Lakhani has attended the economic forum in Russia every year since 2017.

It is legal for Western companies to trade and transport Russian petroleum if the oil is priced at or below the $60 cap imposed by the G-7 countries plus Australia last December. There are separate caps on products such as diesel. The aim of the cap is to keep supplies flowing from Russia and maintain market stability, yet also reduce the Kremlin’s income. The sanctions also ban imports of Russian oil to Europe and the U.S., but allow oil to be sold to places such as China, India and Turkey.

Traders say that, although operating in Russian oil markets is allowed, there are reputational dangers from being seen to finance Putin’s war. The trade got even more complicated for Western companies after the recent price rises in oil markets. Prices for Russian crude and fuel have surged above the various caps.

Some of the biggest commodities traders say they largely withdrew from Russia after the invasion. Rosneft and other Russian producers came to rely on a new group of companies to get their oil to market. Many of these traders and shipowners—such as Tejarinaft, Amur and Bellatrix Energy—are registered in Dubai or Hong Kong and have opaque ownership.

The ships owned or used by these firms are known in the industry as the shadow fleet because they operate without Western financing and insurance.

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Lakhani started out as an oil trader in the 1980s. He was Glencore’s representative in Baghdad in the early 2000s, making payments to the Iraqi government during the oil-for-food program, a failed United Nations attempt to restrict Saddam Hussein’s oil income without causing a humanitarian crisis. He later helped arrange oil sales from Iraqi Kurdistan, including doing deals with Rosneft.

Lakhani lived in Monaco and London in recent years and cultivated connections to Britain’s upper echelons of power. Mercantile & Maritime gave 500,000 pounds, equivalent to about $610,000, to the U.K.’s Conservative Party in 2019—among the biggest donations of the past decade to the ruling party.

Lakhani’s Rosneft relationship deepened in 2019 when the Russian company sought to export oil from Venezuela, whose oil industry was under U.S. sanctions. Lakhani found buyers and helped transport the oil.

Lakhani’s spokesman said that, as of 2019, the sanctions permitted such an operation. After the U.S. sanctioned Rosneft’s Geneva trading arm in 2020, Mercantile & Maritime said it wound down these operations to comply with the sanctions.

Around the same time, Lakhani bought a majority stake in an Austrian trading firm called Cetracore Energy, according to the 2020 annual report. A Rosneft subsidiary owned a minority shareholding.

When Rosneft was hunting for outside investment in a giant Arctic oil project, it tapped Lakhani. In 2021, Mercantile & Maritime teamed up with trading firm Vitol to buy a 5% stake in the project. Lakhani’s joint trading venture with Rosneft, Cetracore, stepped up its activity in Russian oil immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, data from shipping analytics firm Petro-Logistics showed.

The spokesman said in July that Cetracore and all other companies in which Lakhani has an interest stopped trading Russian oil.

In December, Vitol and Lakhani’s Mercantile & Maritime said they had sold their stake in Rosneft’s Vostok oil project. Rosneft exited its Cetracore stake in May this year, company filings show.