Ex-hedge fund boss Crispin Odey cornered a female receptionist after an alcohol-fueled lunch and told her “I could attack you now,” according to a diary entry by the staffer revealed at a London court on Tuesday.
When she verbally resisted his advances, the tycoon told the receptionist ‘You could sue me for that’,” according to notes she took at the time to record Odey’s alleged misconduct. The entry from January 2020 was included as evidence in an internal report compiled by lawyers for Odey Asset Management.
Giving evidence on the first day of three in the witness box, Odey said he couldn’t recall the incident. “Basically they were words,” he said deferring to the diary entry.
Odey, who is facing multiple allegations that he harassed female employees, earlier said that while he thought his advances may have been acceptable when he was younger, by the time he was in his 60s the women likely thought he was a “creepy old man.”
The founder of OAM grabbed and kissed a receptionist in a central London shop store elevator and exchanged sexualized messages with her, leaving the former employee saying she dreaded coming to work, according to a lawyer for the Financial Conduct Authority.
Odey used “highly degrading and humiliating terms” to describe one of the other receptionists criticizing her clothing as “frumpy,” Clare Sibson, the FCA’s lawyer said in court. Odey said that he was concerned about the image of the firm as “she was the front of house.”
“To believe that a 25-year-old was at all interested in a 60-year-old man, that was an old man’s dream. A silly one,” Odey said Tuesday.
Odey is appealing a lifetime ban from UK finance over his “reckless disregard” for governance in dismissing two executive committees from OAM in December 2021 and March 2022. An internal investigation into Odey had discovered at least 46 allegations of “inappropriate conduct” against female employees at his firm over a 17 year period, which led to a final written warning. Around half of the allegations were from the two receptionists.
In another exchange read out in court, Odey sent what he called “flirtatious” messages with one of the receptionists after a lunch together and said on Tuesday that their relationship was purely consensual.
| Odey texts to one receptionist: |
|---|
| “Wish it was all afternoon and in bed,” he said.
“I can’t wait to have you. You are so delicious. Wonderful to be with,” he said in another. “Such foolery, such fun, such love,” he said. |
Odey is accused of seeking to frustrate the firm’s disciplinary process by ousting the committees that were set to consider whether he had breached the terms of the final written warning. The hedge fund tycoon meanwhile is arguing that the regulator pursued an “agenda” against him and that regulatory overreach ultimately caused the demise of his firm.
The trial, in which evidence is set to end on Thursday, has seen former Odey Asset Management portfolio managers and executives brought before the London court to testify, with Odey’s lawyers arguing that employees at OAM had been under undue pressure from the FCA to remove the founder. He has previously labeled some of the allegations against him as fabrications from unhappy staff that the firm fired.
The hearing tests the FCA’s ability to hold executives to account after City firms reported a surge in non-financial misconduct complaints. The proceedings have shed new light on attempts by officials at OAM to deal with the allegations against the firm’s high-profile founder, once one of Britain’s most prominent hedge fund managers and Brexit supporters.
The OAM founder faces a separate trial in the summer that is set to combine personal injury claims brought by five women as well as a defamation case brought by Odey against the Financial Times over its reporting of the harassment allegations, all of which he denies.
Photograph: Crispin Odey in London, on March 24, 2026; photo credit: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg
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