She had been privately planning to launch an online fund "supermarket" called “Bees and Honey”, acting as a middleman between fund managers and private investors, according to the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

The business plan had been to shake up the existing fund supermarket sector, with a much higher degree of content which she believed would differentiate her model from existing players.

The newspaper said those plans have now been put on indefinite hold due to uncertainty surrounding the Retail Distribution Review, the programme of reforms being rolled out by the Financial Services Authority, the UK regulator, from the start of 2013. Part of the RDR deals with fund supermarket platforms.

The FSA suggests that it plans to ban such platforms receiving payments from product providers, an essential element of the business model. However, the RDR’s overall thrust is to drive out the use of commissions and replace these with fees to make financial advice more impartial.

However, as an unintended – or even intended – consequence of the RDR, figures in the industry say up to 15 per cent or more of independent financial advisors will be driven out of the industry.

One industry veteran, Brian Spence, a founder of the IFA consultancy and M&A advisory firm Hamilton Spence, has warned that there are thousands of “orphan clients” being created as IFAs turn their back on clients seen as no longer profitable due to the RDR.

As reported here in February, Horlick, chief executive of Bramdean Asset Management, offered private investors the chance to invest in her latest business venture – a chain of private members’ clubs called Georgina’s Restaurants, structured via the tax-advantaged Enterprise Investment Scheme.The launch followed Horlick’s recent formation of Derby Street Films, a fund which will develop 25 film projects over the next three years.

Among the high points of her career was her stint as the founding director of SG Asset Management (UK), which began in 1997 and where she and her team managed to garner £7 billion (around $11.2 billion) in assets in just three years. However, she suffered a setback during the 2008 financial crisis when it emerged that Bramdean – like many other firms of course – had invested millions with the Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff.