6:45 am, August 20, 2026
A collapsed litigation funder raised more than £300m from individual investors and continued fundraising after an intervention by the City watchdog, a new investigation has revealed.
Woodville Consultants, which provided funding for legal cases including car finance claims, collapsed into administration last month.
Now an investigation by The Times has uncovered fresh details about how the Welsh business raised its money, including its use of promoters associated with other failed investment schemes.
The newspaper reports that Woodville continued raising funds despite the Financial Conduct Authority requesting four years ago that it stop financial promotions relating to investments or loans.
It also found that promoters could earn commissions of between 10% and 15% of investors’ money for selling Woodville investments, separate to fees potentially taken elsewhere in the distribution chain.
Woodville raised money through high-risk debt instruments known as loan notes, with the cash used to fund law firms pursuing legal cases.
These included claims arising from the car finance commission scandal, where uncertainty surrounding the outcome of litigation appears to have contributed to Woodville’s financial problems.
The Pontypridd-based business was placed into administration in July, with insolvency specialists from Kroll appointed.
The Times reports that administrators are now examining how much investors’ money was passed to law firms, the viability of the underlying legal claims, payments to third parties and Woodville’s banking arrangements.
Concerns have also been raised about whether its business model was viable in the first place.
Woodville itself was unregulated, but a regulated company run by the same directors, Ann Marie Bell and Peter Legge, was placed under FCA restrictions in 2022.
The regulator had concerns about Integrity Protect No 1’s handling of loan notes, including evidence that it was ‘borrowing funds via loan notes by using the bank account of Woodville’.
Integrity Protect was told to instruct Woodville to ‘stop all financial promotion of investments or loans’.
However, The Times reports Woodville continued raising money afterwards, with fundraising understood to have increasingly targeted investors outside the UK, including in South America, Europe and Africa.
The investigation also found Woodville was promoted through sales networks which marketed other investment schemes that subsequently failed.
They included 79th Group, which is currently the subject of a City of London Police investigation into ‘suspected widespread fraud’. Its operators deny wrongdoing.
Records seen by The Times also showed that Lawsons, a network of sales consultants, told individual consultants they could earn between 10% and 15% commission on money invested in Woodville.
Some investors have claimed such commissions were not disclosed.
Paul Muscutt, partner at Crowell & Moring, a law firm working with Kroll, said he believed ‘the Woodville investment scheme was fundamentally flawed from the outset’.
He questioned the basis on which it could ‘promise quarterly returns at high interest levels’ when the money needed to generate those returns depended on repayments from law firms pursuing claims such as car finance cases, which were uncertain in both value and timing.
He added: ‘There are concerns the viability of Woodville investments was compromised by the deductions from investors’ capital of sums used to pay for high commissions.’
Woodville had already blamed problems surrounding car finance litigation for delayed repayments.
In May, it told investors that complications had ‘delayed repayments to our law firms and ultimately to us’.
A month later, it said ‘procedural issues’ had delayed a funding line worth up to $500m.
Robert Goodhew, managing director at Kroll, said: ‘We are in the early stages of our work and are engaging closely with the relevant parties to establish the extent of the assets and their likely value.
‘Based on the information currently available to us, we believe that more than £300 million has been raised from investors. This figure remains subject to ongoing review and may be amended as our work continues.’