Financial Times Reports on Woodford’s Investment in Industrial Heat and Cold Fusion

An article in the Alphaville section of the Financial Times (see here — free registration required to read it) reports on the approximately $50 million investment of British investment manager Neil Woodford in Industrial Heat in May 2015.

The author of article, Kadhim Shubber, is very skeptical that cold fusion could work at all, based on his understanding of physics. He is therefore surprised about the Woodford investment, and especially that no one is talking about it.

Shubber also notes that Woodford invested in Industrial Heat, who were backers of Andrea Rossi and the E-Cat, but now claim that the E-Cat can’t produce any measurable excess energy — and he refers to the disputes between Ross and IH in the current court case.

He concludes: “Maybe, just maybe, cold fusion will end up working. Anything’s possible. Never say never. Whatever. Etc. But there’s something undeniably weird about the UK’s most respected fund manager dipping his toes and his clients’ money into this not very credible part of the world.”

Andrea Rossi, on the Journal of Nuclear Physics, responded to the article with this comment:

Andrea Rossi
November 25, 2016 at 10:43 PM
Roslyn Abrams:
Woodford visited the plant during the test in February 2015 and in September 2015: when they invested 50 million dollars in IH the sole license and intellectual property that IH had was the one of Leonardo Corporation. The top level officers that Woodford sent to visit the plant during the test had at their disposal the first and the second querterly report made by the ERV. The fourth and last quarterly report, as well as the third, were substantially equal to the first and the second. IH has also paid the invoices related to the first, the second and the third report of the ERV. Eventually, they did not pay the fourth report, because they said it was not correct. But it was equal to the former three, related to the period during which IH collected funds from their investors. At the end of the second visit to the plant of 1 MW during the test, in September 2015, the senior officer of Woodford said to me the following precise words: ” Congratulations, Dr Rossi, we saw great stuff here”.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

Woodford, in its public statements have been very cautious and conservative regarding their support of LENR, but Rossi alleges they were very impressed with what they learned about the E-Cat. I expect this will be a line of investigation that will be examined in more detail in the court case.