Built on a Lie: The Rise and Fall of Neil Woodford and the Fate of Middle England's Money: How One Man Made a Fortune, Lost His Investors' Billions and Changed an Industry for Ever

Hardcover, vii + 241 pages, NOT ex-library. Book looks unread, clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Unclipped dust jacket shows minor handling wear. -- Written by Owen Walker, an award-winning Financial Times journalist who first broke the story, the book chronicles the collapse of Neil Woodford's multi-billion-pound investment empire. It traces Woodford's trajectory from a "rockstar" fund manager at Invesco Perpetual to the 2019 implosion of his own firm, Woodford Investment Management. The narrative highlights how roughly £3.6 billion in savings from hundreds of thousands of retail investors were trapped in illiquid, high-risk assets. -- This investigative financial expose chronicles one of the most devastating investment scandals in modern British history, detailing the spectacular 2019 collapse of the country's most celebrated stock picker. The narrative traces the trajectory of a star fund manager who built a stellar reputation over two decades by reliably delivering steady returns through conservative blue-chip investments. However, upon establishing an independent firm, this strategy secretly and fatally shifted toward highly speculative, illiquid startup ventures in unlisted biotech and technology sectors. The text details the subsequent liquidity crisis, illustrating how a sudden wave of withdrawal requests forced the suspension of the flagship equity income fund. This unprecedented freeze trapped billions of pounds, effectively devastating the retirement portfolios of hundreds of thousands of everyday retail investors. Beyond individual hubris, the book functions as a scathing critique of the broader UK financial ecosystem. It exposes the systemic complicity of cheerleading wealth management platforms and regulatory oversight bodies that collectively ignored glaring warning signs to protect their own lucrative fee structures. This unvarnished exposure of structural vulnerabilities within asset management serves as a definitive cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked financial cults of personality.…