On 21st October the London Financial Times asked the UK's Financial Conduct Authority for the details of every UCITS fund that had breached the 10% limit on investing in unquoted assets since 1 January 2007. Four months later, the regulator has said that seven firms have done so, proving that the Woodford fund is not the only one that has been hovering close to that limit.

In a request that it made in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the FT asked for the name of each fund, the date of each transgression, the date when each firm reported its transgression to the FCA, the name of every authorised fund manager involved, the name of the investment manager, the name of the depository, the reason for the transgression, whether the transgression happened at the end of a month or was 'intermonth' and whether the it was passive or active.

The FCA answered few of these questions, invoking s44 to claim that most of this information that came after 31st December 2013 was either (a) prohibited by some other law, or (b) incompatible with European Union law, or (c) would be tantamount to contempt of court. It did not divulge the names of any funds. Simultaneously, it claimed that the information that it withheld from before that date was withheld under s12 which absolves it from complying "if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit." This was the case because "regulatory reporting" (one presumes that the FCA is talking exclusively about pro forma, possibly electronic, disclosures) for this type of transgression only started in 2014, before which date it can only be found in "fund manager files" that are not very searchable.

UCITS are Undertakings for the Collective Investment in Transferable Securities. The European Union's rules allow a UCITS fund to invest up to 10% of the portfolio in transferable securities which are not dealt in an ‘eligible market’.