Crispin Odey: I can’t remember telling female employee ‘I could attack you now’

Facing a litany of questions over sexual harassment allegations that have left his career in tatters, the hedge fund tycoon Crispin Odey has told a court he does not remember cornering a female employee after a boozy lunch and saying to her “I could attack you now”.The 67-year-old made the comments during his first day in the witness box as part of a three-week court case that Odey hopes will overturn the City regulator’s decision to ban him from the UK’s financial services industry.Odey, who appeared in the London courtroom wearing a pink tie and braces, said that while he remembered the employee as an “attractive girl”, he did not recall the alleged incident, which lawyers for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said had been recorded in the employee’s diary.The entry referring to Odey, dated 24 January 2020, said: “Comes back from boozy lunch and corners me in the corridor. Him: I could attack you now. Me: Please don’t. Him: You could sue me for that.”Asked for his response to the diary entry, Odey said he did not remember it, saying only that the employee “was an attractive girl … she kept a diary which I didn’t know about”.He said: “Given that someone keeps a diary, I anticipate they are writing what they said, but when I read these things it’s no surprise I don’t remember them. They were words.”He admitted to the court to having groped a colleague’s breasts without her consent in 2005, which he blamed on having been under sedatives after root canal treatment. He said the woman accepted his apology and continued to work for the firm for another eight years.The Brexit-backing hedge fund chief, who resigned in 2023, is trying to overturn the regulator’s decision to ban him from taking any senior roles in the UK financial sector. The FCA claimed he showed a “lack of integrity” by deliberately attempting to frustrate an investigation by his own hedge fund into allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies.Odey said in his witness statement that he had not tried to prevent an investigation but that he had attempted to have the FCA rule on whether he was fit and proper first. “I could not contemplate a hastily convened disciplinary process being undertaken internally that could see me leaving the firm, before the authority had completed its investigation and decided on my conduct over a 20-year period,” he said.He claimed he had been treated unfairly by the FCA. “Both my relationship and the firm’s relationship with the authority changed when in May 2020 I was charged in connection with a sexual assault allegation dating back to 1999. I can now see that the case was taken up by the authority as something of a cause célèbre because at the time they were seeking to assert their reach over non-financial misconduct. I became, I fear, a poster boy for the authority’s agenda.”The FCA claims Odey is not a fit and proper person to run a financial services company, having shown a “reckless disregard” for compliance and having treated internal disciplinary processes with “contempt”.Odey has since launched a £79m libel lawsuit against the Financial Times, saying he suffered “very significant financial loss” because of articles alleging he had sexually assaulted or harassed multiple women. The allegations, which emerged in the media in summer 2023, eventually led to him being removed from OAM, which announced plans to close in October that year.The FCA’s lawyer Clare Sibson pushed Odey on a number of other harassment allegations, including those filed by a receptionist in her mid-20s. Odey had invited the receptionist to a shooting weekend in Bristol in 2020, which she eventually declined, recalling to investigators that she knew “what was expected of me”. The receptionist was later fired from the firm without a bonus, which Odey said he was not involved in and that he believed was unfair.Odey told the court during an at-times testy cross-examination that he believed his relationship with the unnamed receptionist was “consensual”, and he alleged she was a “flirt” who left other members of staff jealous of her interaction with him.He said he had probably been swept up in “an old man’s dream” that a woman in her 20s would be interested in a man in his 60s, but later realised she was “dangerous”. “The way she flirted with me was inappropriate, on both sides,” Odey said.He conceded that over time his flirtations with young women in the office may have made him seem like a “creepy old man”.In his witness statement, Odey admitted to having been “something of a dinosaur” who had not “adapted to the modern working environment”. He said an internal investigation had made it clear “that I had got things wrong”. “It was not right that members of staff felt uncomfortable because of my behaviour,” he added in the statement.Odey is also facing civil personal injury claims by five women, including one who accused him of rape, which he also denies. Those cases are scheduled to be heard together in joint proceedings in June.The hearing continues.