The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Personal Account
Expunged of his talent, Neil Woodford is attempting a glorious come back with a Trumpian plan to rewrite history
The brilliant investor who made Middle England rich. A “star” fund manager with shoulders broad enough to carry the retirement hopes and dreams of thousands. And a scoundrel whose safe pair of hands took money from savers and plunged it into high-risk and unsellable stocks.
Neil Woodford’s name has been written too many times in this newspaper. At first it lauded a man smart enough to avoid the worst of the tech and banking crises. Then it praised his entrepreneurial spirit to go it alone.
But as with many heroes, who merely live long enough to become villains, we then had to chart the predictable demise and the damage caused to hundreds of thousands of innocent savers.
If I had my way, we would never mention his name again. Alas, we are here once more. This time it’s necessary, as once again we have to warn of the danger this man poses.
In an interview published in The Sunday Telegraph, as well as plugging his comeback, the disgraced manager told us three things. He still sees himself as the victim, he carries no sympathy for the damage he caused and he will do everything he can to rewrite history and make himself the hero once more.
It is this that makes him no different from the gutter politicians that plague society, who will attempt to change facts and do anything to prove everyone is against them, rather than it being their own inadequacy behind their demise. The fact that Mr Woodford sat down with a national newspaper to promote his comeback and proceeded to criticise “the media” for his own downfall is testament to this.
The sad truth is that Mr Woodford and his merry “yes men” have always operated this strategy. When his once-£10bn
Equity Income fund started to lose money, it was markets that were wrong, not him. When huge bets at Provident Financial and Capita fell apart, Mr Woodford again blamed others, even though an amateur stock picker wouldn’t have touched such firms with a barge pole.
Mr Woodford now claims his investors would have been better off had he been left to run their savings. However, a look at his holdings at the time show that it’s more likely they’d be £300m worse off, as we reported this week.
These Trumpian strategies carry all the same hallmarks: attack, bend the truth, split the crowd and play for sympathy. The last time I saw Mr Woodford in the flesh, in 2015, he told a packed room of journalists that far from being arrogant, he suffered from impostor syndrome. A laughable claim and an insult to those who are held back by it.
Criticisms in the media were almost instantly met with phone calls requesting a “re- education” meeting. Demands for answers by journalists on his stock picks were met with derision and claims they wouldn’t understand.
These aren’t the traits of people who are good at their job. They get on with it and let their work do the talking.
We write about Neil Woodford once more but this time in a plea to you, our readers, never to hand over any of your savings to this man ever again. His shoulders are weak, his ideas are wrong and I guarantee you that the “safe pair of hands” will want to line its own pockets before yours.
Woodford is no different from gutter politicians that plague society, trying to change facts
For most people, remortgaging their property means a call to the bank or a meeting with a mortgage broker, but for Alastair Kerr it was a year-long mission. He is one of Britain’s biggest private landlords, owning 330 rental homes in west London, but like many investors he has been hit by unfavourable tax changes.
In what is thought to be the country’s largest ever mortgage transaction, Mr Kerr has shifted his entire portfolio from his own name into a company structure in a single day, a move that will save him more than £10m in tax and mortgage interest. He has urged other landlords to re-examine their businesses and do the same.
Since April 2017 landlords have been restricted in the level of expenses they can offset against their tax bill. Many have decided to incorporate their business, as this allows for more expenditure to be tax deductible. But for Mr Kerr, who owns properties in the London suburbs of Chiswick, Hammersmith, Fulham, Acton and Ealing, this meant more than a year of planning.
The 64-year-old had to transfer ownership of all his properties on a single day to take advantage of incorporation relief rules, or he would have faced a capital gains tax bill for tens of millions of pounds.
It was a move that would also save him more than £1m in mortgage interest in the next five years, according to Howard Levy of SPF Private Clients, the broker who arranged the transaction.
It involved multiple mortgage lenders and dozens of solicitors, surveyors and property experts. While completing the transactions on the same day meant he avoided a CGT bill, stamp duty was still payable, albeit at a much lower rate owing to the current tax break. As he completed before the March 31 deadline, he paid tax on just the amount over £ 500,000 for each applicable property, plus the three percentage point surcharge. He is thought to have saved millions thanks to the stamp duty holiday.
Mr Kerr’s property career started by chance in 1995, thanks to a transport strike that forced him to walk home from work. He spotted a studio flat for sale for £26,500 and bought it at auction. After renovating the apartment it increased in value by £10,000 and his property empire grew from there.
The making of his business was the financial crisis of 2008, he said. With fixed mortgage rates of up to 8pc, Mr Kerr decided to move many of his properties on to variable-rate deals and benefited hugely when the Bank Rate plunged in the wake of the crisis.
“I was sure the economy was going to have a bad time,” he said. “I remortgaged just about my entire business and put the money in the bank.” Landlor Landlords are often criticised for owning pr properties that could otherwise hous house first-time buyers, but Mr Kerr blame blames mortgage lenders for their woes. “Th The market is tilted against them,” he said. “In London you’ll have people comfortably co paying £ 1,500 a month in rent but then the bank will say they can c only afford a mortgage with £600 repayments. It’s quite clear that people peopl can afford more than that.” What i is Mr Kerr’s advice to landlords looking loo to follow in his footsteps? “A “Always have a plan B,” he said. “What h happens if something goes wrong? You can go bankrupt if something fa falls through.” He al also urged landlords to ensure they had ha enough time set aside to complet complete a purchase. “Some transactions c can take much longer than expected. You might think it’ll all be sorted in t two or three months but you should set aside six,” he added.