With the Charity Commission's public consultation concerning the 'public benefit' requirement of the new Charities Act currently underway, and the possible taxation of university presses being reported in the newspapers (The Bookseller 16th March, The Guardian 17th April 2007), Akme is pleased to announce that it has at last obtained and posted on the internet the original documentation of the UK's two major university presses' covert claims in the 1970s for tax exemption. Everything alleged in 1999 in the 5th Appendix to Andrew Malcolm's The Remedy turns out to be 100% true, and more.
The story began with Oxford's more sedate 'sister' press at Cambridge. In 1940 CUP was formally refused tax-exemption on the fair-trade grounds that its bookselling in the open market took its activities outside the charitable educational purposes of the University itself. In 1952 OUP was likewise refused. In 1975, facing financial collapse, CUP tried again, and its Chief Executive Geoffrey Cass, in order to avoid the unwelcome publicity and uncertain outcome of an open hearing, applied not, as would be usual, to the Charity Commission, but secretly to his local tax inspector. Cass's 100-page submission did not even qualify as a full application, being cast by him as merely a 'preliminary letter'. As is now revealed, this letter, despite an Inland Revenue plea to the contrary, goes lengthily, and at times comically, into the early history of printing and publishing at Cambridge, quoting liberally from ancient royal edicts and quaint university addresses. Besides its wilful irrelevance, Cass's submission is also amusingly coy about distasteful notions like 'trading' and 'the market-place', which, when they do eventually feature, appear in inverted commas. Even more distasteful for Cass is any comparison with OUP, from which he heavily, even scornfully, distinguishes his own "literally unique" press. "OUP," he wrote, "has moved far away from the concept of the 'pure' university press, to become a general international publishing house... As a total 'animal' it is quite different."
Under Cass's threat of CUP's full application being "a hundred times longer", and upon his undertaking that it would operate on a not-for-profit basis and plough all of its surpluses back into unprofitable academic publishing, the Inland Revenue granted CUP exemption from tax 'quietly' in November 1976. In March 1977, citing the CUP decision as a precedent (notwithstanding Cass's repeated disclaimers), OUP's Chief Executive George Richardson wrote to his local tax inspector in a similar fashion for a similar dispensation, which on a similar not-for-profit basis was quietly granted in September 1978.
On the back of these hitherto unpublished decisions, and now heavily in breach of its not-for-profit mandate, OUP has inevitably prospered at the expense of its marketplace competitors, many of which it has since bought out, to become UK's largest independent publisher. Never mind the new 'public benefit' requirement, a public re-examination of the two university presses' covert dispensations of the 1970s is long overdue. Now, for the first time, thanks to Akme, this is possible.
Also featuring: OUP's accounts 2007, The Bitch of the Baskervilles, The Oxford College Accounts 2005/6, The Worst Science Textbooks Ever Published, and more...
|
December 2007: THE WHEEDLERS' WARAt last obtained by Akme: |