Cofunds suspended Arch Cru funds over late filing of reports

Concerns over the late filing of reports on the underlying investment ‘cells’ that sit behind the Arch Cru fund range led Cofunds to soft-close the funds, the platform has said.

Meanwhile, Fidelity was in the process of removing the fund range from FundsNetwork altogether, despite only having placed the range on the funds on the platform in December.

Cofunds, which soft-closed the funds on 9 March, said that it made clear its concerns to fund managers Arch Financial Products about the late filing of audited reports on the investment ‘cells’ to the Channel Islands stock exchange.

The platform did not notify investors about the soft closure but said it had been waiting for a satisfactory response from Arch

‘We were assured Arch would give us an answer in days as to why the accounts were filed late,’ said a Cofunds spokeswoman.

She said that given the small number of investors in the funds on the platform, Cofunds decided not to notify investors for fear of raising alarm bells in the market.

‘Given the number of investors, we thought it was a proportionate response,’ she said.

Arch has 23 cells listed on the Channel islands stock exchange, and the Arch Cru funds invest in a selection of these.

Arch secured a ‘derogation’ from reporting on a number of these for the period up to March 2007 because it argued the period was too short tom produce useful data.

It then secured a one month’s extension to the 31 September 2008 deadline for filing reports on 17 of the cells after it said it had underestimated the volume of work involved in the audit.