Top investor buys shares in Imperial Innovations

One of the UK’s top investors, Neil Woodford has invested a further £11.6 million into Imperial Innovations, the intermediary between Imperial research and the wider world, taking his stake over 20%.

Imperial Innovations had posted a pre tax loss of £5.9 million in the six months before the end of January, but its share prices have bounced back to £3.45 a share, largely in part to the purchase by Woodford, whose fund now owns 21% of the company, up from 19.9%.

Woodford is also the manager of Capita Financial Woodford Equity a fund which has a huge chunk of its portfolio in the tobacco industry. Eagle-eyed readers of FELIX will notice that this is the fund where Imperial College have themselves been investing £5.8 million of their endowment fund, of which almost £1 million goes directly into tobacco companies. All in all Woodford and Imperial (in one form or another) are linked, a link that ties a university which focuses on research into cancer, directly to the tobacco industry.

Imperial Innovations has a sole commercialisation rights deal on technology coming out of Imperial College research until 2020 and have recently been in the news after selling its remaining shares in Alkion Biopharm, an Imperial College spinoff company, to chemical giant Evonik Industries. Imperial Innovations also oversee Yoyo Wallet, the app which means you can still by drinks even if you drunkenly lose your debit card at ACC.

Woodford has also waded into the EU referendum debate this week, saying that Brexit or a Bremain was not really the most important issue affecting the global economy in the long term, and that the things that he believes are likely to cause the chaos (growing wealth inequality, the Chinese credit bubble and the aging population to name a few) will not go away in either scenario.

So in essence whichever way you vote on June 23rd, we might all be fucked regardless.