£500,000 loss for billionaire Brexit donor’s Blue Whale fund

A NEW investment firm backed by billionaire Brexit donor Peter Hargreaves has posted a near-£500,000 loss as it reels in investors.

Hargreaves, co-founder of investment giant Hargreaves Lansdown, invested £25 million of his £3.2 billion personal fortune into Blue Whale Capital, which focuses on major overseas markets. The company’s £470,549 loss covers the seven months since the Blue Whale fund launched last September.

The maiden accounts, for the year to March 31, also show an £18,000 payment to Hargreaves’ son, Robert, for ‘consultancy services’.

Blue Whale’s chief investment officer, Stephen Yiu, said the fund has outperformed its peers by more than 10 per cent this year and will break even by next March.

As of this month, it has £70 million of assets under management.

Hargreaves was one of the UK’s biggest financial Brexit backers, having given £3.2 million to the Leave campaign.

He started Blue Whale to help ‘insular’ British investors raise their exposure to international markets.

More than 70 per cent of its investments are in the US, compared to around 15 per cent in the UK.

Its top ten holdings include Facebook, Amazon, PayPal and Microsoft.

Hargreaves, 71, remains a major shareholder in Hargreaves Lansdown after stepping down in 2015 due to a health scare.

In May, he joined the space race by taking control of the Goonhilly satellite tracking station in Cornwall.