Woodford debacle: shares hit as HL faces the music

On 18 June, a fortnight after Neil Woodford’s Equity Income Fund was suspended, Chris Hill wrote to the Treasury Select Committee to outline the impact on Hargreaves Lansdown (HL.) customers. At the time trading in the fund was halted, the investment platform's chief executive explained, some 291,520 accounts were directly or indirectly invested in the fund. This week, those clients learned that the fund, which the platform consistently plugged through its best buy lists, would not reopen.