Woodford Equity Income investors set for third payment amid fire sale
Majority of assets now sold
Woodford Equity Income investors are set for their third payout from the collapsed fund, which has now sold off the majority of its assets and commenced the offloading of a £220m basket of healthcare holdings.
The fund's authorised corporate director Link Fund Solutions told investors in a letter today that the vehicle now has around $58m in cash available for distribution, with further sales set to bolster that figure "over the next three weeks".
Link managing director Karl Midl said the payments will be made via one single distribution to investors with available cash as opposed to "a series of smaller distributions".
The ACD told investors it would write to them again "on or around" 19 August, detailing the total amount available for the fund's third capital distribution, while the firm expects to send another letter around 21 August revealing how much individual investors are entitled to and when they will receive payment.
In June, Link announced the agreed sale of 19 healthcare assets, comprising both listed and unlisted stocks including Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Rutherford Health, in a deal with US firm Acacia Research Corporation valued at up to £223.9m.
The letter warned investors they should be "aware that reports relating to the values attributed to the transfer of single assets forming part of the portfolio can be misleading".
It follows a 350% one-day increase in former fund holding Synairgen earlier this month amid news that the biotech firm had made a breakthrough in coronavirus treatment.
The letter reminded investors that assets will individually transfer to Acadia "at different times over a period of up to six months", but said "the transaction should be viewed as a whole" as opposed to "a series of sales of individual assets".
Future capital distributions will be made "as and when suitable amounts of cash have been received" from the Acadia assets as well as the sale of other fund holdings, which are "less liquid" and therefore "may take longer [to sell] than was the case for the sales to date".
As a result of the remaining assets being less liquid, and therefore harder to value, from 26 August the fund's indicative NAV will only be published on a monthly basis.
In addition, the fund's annual accounts annual accounts will be delayed from the end of July to 31 August, owing to "the impact of Covid-19 and the requirement for additional control steps in the audit sign-off process", Link said.
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