Laura WilesThe FCA has issued a response to complaints regarding its handling of Wellesley & Co, a formerly authorised firm which had promoted and arranged high-risk property development investments which were not covered by the FSCS.
The FCA had launched an investigation in 2022 following an unregulated entity in the Wellesley group entering an insolvency process with creditors owed around £135m. Around £80m of this amount had been return to investors when the FCA closed its investigation in January 2026, having ultimately found that Wellesley had not given investors misleading information or defrauded them. Wellesley itself entered administration in April 2025.
The FCA has upheld one complaint around how Wellesley’s authorisation process was handled, but concluded that this had not caused investors’ losses, which in fact resulted from the failure of unregulated group companies. The investigation into this complaint found that the decision to authorise Wellesley had not fully followed processes set out in the regulator’s own guidance documents.
The complaint alleged the FCA had failed to detect that the firm was in effect insolvent from 2018: the FCA countered that it knew that an unauthorised group firm was balance-sheet insolvent at the time but did not consider this a barrier to Wellesley’s authorisation, and that the group’s solvency issues only because clear in 2020 once the authorisation was in place. Further details of the relevant process in place at the time are not included in the FCA’s response due to restrictions on publishing information received from a firm.
The regulator also reinstated that it has not concluded that Wellesley should not have been authorised, and noted that a range of complaints received did not fall within the relevant complaints scheme, primarily those relating to Wellesley Finance and other unregulated entities within the wider corporate group.