Neil Woodford "suspends redemptions" for Woodford Equity Income Fund.

It's amazing easy to steal from ignorant fools who place too much trust with their stored labor in the hands of others.  All you have to do is promise them something for nothing and ask them to ignore the fine print and to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  And of course when the leveraged debt Ponzi goes bad, you simply create a heartfelt-sounding mea culpa explaining why they had to fuck you over and how you should actually be relieved that those who have lost your savings for you are now on the job ensuring you cannot take what little remains out of their corrupt fund.

Here, watch Neil Woodford do it in 3 minutes.

Here's the transcript as spoken by Woodford:
"As difficult a decision as this is and clearly frustrating for you, our investors,we felt that this was necessary to protect your interests.The situation that we confronted was that we were seeing a loss of outflow in the portfolio.  As a result of that increased level of redemptions, what we were seeing was the stock market, in a way, anticipating the fact that we would have to be sellers of stocks to meet those redemptions. And we felt the prices that we would be able to achieve in order to meet those redemptions would be disadvantageous for our investors. 

So fund suspension means that there is no inflow or outflow into the Woodford Equity Income Fund. But fundamentally the strategy remains the same.
Investors money is preserved in the assets in which we've invested.  And the portfolio continues to work for our investors.  So the suspension provides us with the time  to execute the strategy that we've communicated to our investors. 

And just to remind you, that strategy is about reducing the fund's exposure to illiquid and unquoteds, down to zero.  That process is underway and is continuing, but was made obviously much more difficult by the outflow that we were witnessing.  So the suspension of dealing in the funds enables, us gives us the time and space, if you like, to execute that strategy, to reduce our exposure, and redeploy that capital into more liquid stocks in the FTSE 350, but primarily in the FTSE 100, that fit in with my core strategy, but which are more liquid and more conventional, if you like.

So it's important to stress that the suspension applies only to the Woodford Equity Income Fund. The focus fund is open as normal to buying and selling. It's a different portfolio.  It doesn't have any exposure to illiquid or unquoted securities, and consequently isn't exposed to the same issues that the Woodford Equity Income Fund is. And it's positioned, I believe, for the economic and market environment that we'd like to see over the medium and long term.

We will be providing regular updates on the fund. We will price the fund daily.  So investors will have a clear idea of what's happening in the fund.  So again, I'm extremely sorry that we've had to take this decision.  We will keep our investors informed. We will use this time to reposition the fund in the way that we said.  We understand our investors frustration.  All I can say in response to that, of course, is that this decision was motivated by your interests, our investors. When it is appropriate, we will open the fund so you can buy or sell as normal."

Here's the Economati translation into English:
"Dear Sucker, you gave money to strangers so that we could gamble it.  What else did you think we meant by "equity income fund"?  You hoped for your money to "work for you", to self multiply without you adding any labor.  Yeah, I know, this is what Wall St. tells us to do as the responsible thing.  But you should know better.  The  only way new value arrives without doing work is through theft or gambling.  There is no such thing as "investing".  Investing is gambling, moron.  When you gamble, sometimes you lose.  This time it was your turn.

So by now it is clear we went way out on a limb with "kant miss" leverage on risky "assets" while failing to respect that markets are cyclic and that after every boom comes the bust.  Yeah, we are really sorry about that.  And truth be told, we kind of knew it was going to happen.  But what did you want us to do, warn you of impending collapse?  You would have taken your money back and then our fund management fees would have collapsed.  That would be the end of our income and of course we value our current and future income more than your past earnings so of course we said nothing until the trap door opened.

But its not all our fault.  Evil people have been watching us and they want to take advantage of our weakness during this period of "high redemptions".  Thus, in order to foil those evil bastards we will stop you from taking your money out.  By doing this they will eventually tire of attacking our illiquid (worthless) assets.  Prices will then bob back up like a cork in the ocean and then you can get out.  So we are doing this all for you.  We are sorry that you might be angry over this, having lost confidence in our Ponzi scheme and all, but really, just sit there and watch the value of our "fund" continue to collapse because there is nothing you can legally do about it.  Did you read the fine print?  We actually have the legal right to halt money in and out of our Ponzi.

Now don't worry, this is temporary (cough cough).  We will beat the bad people who are trying to make you sell low and then when prices come up you can sell if you want.  And by the way, our stupidity and greed was limited to just this one fund. The others are golden.  Trust us!

I say again for the cheap seats: these markets are very stretched and in need of massive and rapid selling.  Too many people think they are all going to gain something for nothing.  This will not end well.