Woodford joins Juno Capital

Neil Woodford has resurfaced after the demise of his investment firm Woodford Investment Management (WIM) to take on a role at alternative asset management firm Juno Capital, Sky News reported on Saturday.
Woodford is thought to have joined Juno alongside former WIM chief executive Craig Newman to assist with assembling a pipeline of unquoted healthcare stocks. It is unclear how long their tenure is expected to last.
The stock picker left WIM on ignominious terms in October 2019 after its flagship Equity Income fund crashed and was frozen to investor redemptions,  although the spinout-focused Patient Capital Trust was subsequently rescued by asset management firm Schroders.
Woodford was at one stage responsible for managing £15bn ($18.8bn) in deposits, the bulk of which came from retail investment saving clients. That made him a target for public derision, even with his importance to the UK’s innovation sector.
WIM’s closure left exposed big biotech investments such as commercialisation firm IP Group and University of Oxford’s genetic sequencing technology spinout Oxford Nanopore, with some of the stocks recently offloaded at discount to an unnamed US-based investor, according to Sky News.
Woodford’s work for Juno Capital comes after reports had suggested he hoped to raise $655m for a new fund backed by unnamed UK-based institutional investors.
The vehicle was to have carved a portfolio from former WIM holdings such as drug molecule discovery technology business BenevolentAI at reduced prices, but does not appear to have come to fruition.