Hedge fund founder Crispin Odey has lost his appeal against a ban from Britain's financial services industry, with the Upper Tribunal upholding the regulator's finding that he lacked integrity — while trimming his fine from about £1.83 million to just under £1.53 million.

Odey founded Odey Asset Management in 1991 and became one of the City's most famous figures, making a fortune by short-selling bank shares during the 2008 financial crisis. He was also a prominent Brexit supporter and Conservative Party donor, a combination that kept him in the political as well as financial headlines.

The Financial Conduct Authority's case was not, formally, about the underlying allegations of sexual harassment made against him by female staff. It was about his response to them. The regulator said that between December 2021 and November 2022, Odey twice dismissed his firm's executive committee when it was trying to discipline him, deliberately frustrating the process. The tribunal agreed, finding he had misused his power as the firm's controller to protect his own interests and had shown no contrition.

The allegations themselves became public in June 2023, when the Financial Times published an investigation in which women described harassment or assault over many years. Odey denied the allegations, but he left the firm within days, investors pulled money, funds were suspended, and Odey Asset Management ceased trading later that year — an astonishingly fast death for a firm built over three decades.

Separate civil claims by five women alleging sexual assault between 1995 and 2021 were settled earlier in 2026, shortly before a High Court hearing, on undisclosed terms. Their lawyers praised the women's resilience and noted that money could fund therapy and offset damaged careers but could not undo harm. Odey had previously been acquitted in a 2021 criminal trial of an indecent assault allegation dating to 1998.

In its 229-page ruling, the tribunal said Odey's conduct risked entrenching a culture in which inappropriate behaviour towards female employees had been normalised, and described his justifications as reflecting a strong sense of entitlement. The FCA's enforcement director said he had clearly thought he could act with impunity.

Odey's fall is now complete in regulatory terms: the firm gone, the civil claims settled, the ban upheld. It stands as the City's starkest recent example of a founder whose personal conduct — and, in the tribunal's words, his refusal to submit to his own firm's governance — destroyed the institution he created.