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Some of the mansions and penthouses in London’s most desirable neighbourhoods have lost more than a quarter of their value over the past 12 months, according to official data.

High-end estate agents in the capital blamed the “prime” housing market slowdown in areas such as Mayfair, Marylebone and Little Venice on tax changes for so-called non-doms last year, which prompted many wealthy individuals to move to other countries.

New data from the Office for National Statistics, published on Wednesday, showed that house prices in inner London boroughs fell by 8.3 per cent in the 12 months to June.

In some areas, the declines are much more stark. Prices in Westminster, for example, which includes affluent districts such as St John’s Wood, Belgravia and Mayfair, dropped 25.4 per cent year-on-year, while they slipped by 20.4 per cent in the City of London and by 14.7 per cent in Kensington and Chelsea.

Which is the better bet, the monkey or the organ grinder? That is the unusual choice offered by the asset manager ICG and its prize specimen, ICG Enterprise Trust. While the FTSE 100 ICG manages capital for institutional and super-wealthy private clients, the trust is in the FTSE 250 and offers less well-off investors a portfolio of unquoted equities.

ICG, formerly Intermediate Capital Group, was founded in 1989 by six investment professionals to cater for companies that needed capital to expand but did not want to issue more shares. The solution was the then-novel mezzanine capital, typically debt with an equity kicker, which was being imported from the US. After only five years, the firm listed on the London stock market and diversified into private credit, real estate, infrastructure and private equity for what are now 880 clients, including pension, sovereign and family office funds.

It runs its $126 billion (£94 billion) of managed assets through a dozen funds, known as strategies, the latest worth €12 billion (£10.2 billion). It partners with other funds such as France’s Amundi, the largest provider of ETF funds outside the US, which has taken a 9.9 per cent stake in ICG.

From ICG shareholders’ point of view, one advantage of this system is that investors in the underlying funds cannot bail out unless ICG sells one of a fund’s holdings or is wound up. This means that fee income is solid, predictable and not linked to underlying asset values. 

In 2016, ICG bought the private equity fund investment business of Graphite Capital, a launch investor in ICG. A major attraction was Graphite’s listed investment trust, which it now manages as ICG Enterprise Trust. Its aim is to generate long-term compounding capital growth by investing in mid-market privately owned businesses in Europe and the US, giving smaller investors the direct chance to experience the ICG style. Unlike many investment trusts, it is comfortable owning a group of illiquid equities that might otherwise be out of reach.

To achieve this, it focuses on mature buyouts and profitable, cash-generating companies, with an enterprise value of £250 million to £2 billion. ICG handles only 28 per cent of the trust’s £1.3 billion portfolio by value, bringing in experienced international private equity managers for the rest. 

Oliver Gardey, ICG’s head of private equity investments, said: “That gives us a diversified portfolio of resilient companies with a more consistent return profile, more liquidity, and better realisations where the performance is less cyclical or seasonal.”

The trust’s shares fell £2 to £13.10 in this spring’s AI selloff, although it has recovered since. The 12 per cent of its fund in software shares is mainly in cybersecurity, accounting, payroll, and compliance firms, which currently benefit from AI. 

Most people will not have heard of the firms or funds in the trust’s portfolio. Performance lately has been unspectacular. In the three months ending April 30, the portfolio return on a local currency basis was zero, and the net asset value per share total return was 0.1 per cent. 

AstraZeneca has revealed its latest setback in just over a month after halting a late-stage lung cancer treatment trial.

The FTSE 100 pharmaceutical company said it found its Volrustomig drug, when combined with chemotherapy, was unlikely to boost survival rates for lung cancer patients when compared with another existing treatment.

Its move to stop the phase-three trial follows a recommendation from an Independent Data Monitoring Committee after a planned review of data from the trials.

The decision marks a further blow after AstraZeneca had billions wiped off its stock market value following its decision in July to stop a trial for a new heart disease drug, called Wainua.