Maguire yanked pension out of Arch cru weeks before collapse

Cru investment management founder Jon Maguire cashed in his £150,000 investment in Arch cru just 14 weeks before the fund range was suspended, and while his firm was still promoting the troubled fund to other investors.

Documents detailing Maguire's personal pension arrangements seen by IFAonline show he invested £154,802 - £77,016.26 in each of the CF Arch cru Investment and CF Arch cru Specialist portfolios - in October 2006 but dumped all of his units on 28 November 2008.

The investments - which had grown to £94,479.61 in the Specialist portfolio and £80,998.49 in the Investment portfolio - were sold for a cash profit and Maguire then deposited the total £175,478.10 into his Self-Invested Personal Pension.

Just 14 weeks later, on 13 March 2009, the decision to suspend dealing on the funds was taken by outsourcing firm Capita, acting as the funds' trustee, and the FSA, due to liquidity problems.

Liquidity in the fund dried up due to the size of redemption requests, and the inability of portfolio managers Arch Financial to sell holdings fast enough to raise cash for investors who wanted to get out..

Documents show the money from the sale of his CF Arch cru holdings was still safely in Maguire's pension account on 16 March 2009, three days after the suspension which left other investors unable to sell out of their CF Arch cru investments.

Nine months later in December 2009 Capita published estimates for the net asset values of the underlying cells, which showed a loss of £140m between 13 March 2009, when the range was suspended, and 30 September 30 2009. Individual funds lost between 20% and 40% over this period.

Speaking to IFAonline in response to the revelations, Maguire said: "All my investments were seeded to the Africa fund and how my personal pension details have got into the public domain is disgraceful."

He declined to make any further comment.

However in an email to members of the CF Arch compensation group, which Maguire set up, sent in January 2010, Maguire gives the impression he is in the same boat as investors who lost money when the Arch cru fund range was suspended.

He said: "I am on the point of bankruptcy. This has cost me all my assets and I have had no income since April 2009."

Elsewhere in the email Maguire seems to claim he did not know about the problems with the fund range.

"I deeply regret and apologise without reservation for my involvement in encouraging investments into the funds - we did not misrepresent the funds but what we were told by Arch and what was really happening were two different things."

The cru fund range of six unit trusts -CF Arch cru Finance, Income, Balanced, Global Growth, Specialist and Investment - held assets that at one time were valued at £425m.

cru Investment Management, established in 2006 by Maguire, marketed the range, and was entitled to a cut of the funds' annual management charge as their distributor, thought to be 0.9%.