These are AKME's aims too, of course, so here goes. It is generally assumed, or glossed, that the university presses enjoy charitable status by virtue of being owned by their universities, which themselves automatically qualify for charitable status as educational institutions as defined by the Charities Acts. Not so. This in fact turns out to be an argument rather than an axiom. As far as the charity lawyers, and therefore the Inland Revenue Special Commissioners are concerned, the universities and their presses are financially distinct entities. In law the charitable purposes of the university presses' operations stand in independent legal requirement of their own intrinsic definition and validation, and until surprisingly recently none was tax-exempt.

So it was that in 1940 Cambridge University Press applied to the Inland Revenue (but not to the Charity Commission) for tax-exemption and was refused, on the eminently reasonable grounds that, because it did not confine itself to book distribution within the university but traded alongside commercial publishers in the open market, its business went beyond the charitable, educational purposes strictly defined for the University itself. It was held that conferring such a privilege on CUP would have given it an unfair advantage over its tax-paying competitors. This is a consideration often invoked in such charity-law disputes, and it was a view that was then widely held even within CUP, many of whose managers did not want to be seen to be receiving any special, unbusinesslike privilege, and correctly suspected that if they were granted one, they would become generally resented by the rest of the trade. It was also feared darkly that seeking tax exemption for the Press might somehow jeopardise the government's funding of the University itself. When it failed, the application was therefore not pursued.

In 1975, however, CUP's chief executive Geoffrey Cass tried again, and several features of his determined reattempt should at once be noted. First, as in 1940, it was not a conventional application to the Charity Commission, which would have required a public 'governing document' of aims and limitations (such as the memorandum and articles of a limited liability company), but a private request for tax-exemption made to the local Inland Revenue department. It was thought that to risk legal proceedings, whatever their outcome, would be to invite the bad publicity the Press so dreaded, so this more 'discreet' method was favoured. (It has been suggested that the strikingly unpatriotic timing of CUP's previous application was chosen to keep, as it successfully did, reports of it out of the wartime newspapers). Even Cass's new, quiet, backdoor approach never achieved the status of a full submission, but consisted only of a 'preliminary letter', albeit a sixty-page one, threatening the tax officials with a deluge:

"This letter is not our formal submission: but there seems to me no reason nevertheless why it could not provide a basis for an Inland Revenue decision to exempt the Press, at this stage. Our formal submission, when completed in the Spring [of 1976 - it was never completed], is likely to be several hundred times bigger than this letter. Yet the complete dossier of evidence and historical documents will, in the main, merely reinforce each of the key points of this letter a hundred times over. I have extracted for this letter the crucial items which would determine the case."

One result of this unusual tactic was that there was never, as is customary, a formal hearing to decide the question, a question whose implications if applied to other university presses would arguably make it one of the most important decisions in charity law this century. When the Inland Revenue privately decided in 1976 in CUP''s favour, there was thus no reasoned judgment to dissect, no law report to ponder, no solemn written conditions or undertakings, and not a single mention of the momentous ruling in any newspaper. Perhaps, therefore, it is now high time to re-examine Cass's 'crucial items' of 1975 to see how they have fared over the years, and to decide, for example, how they relate to OUP's current ethos and latest grand munificence.

Cass's first argument was that from the constitutional and legal point of view CUP had no separate corporate status apart from 'the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge', itself an educational charity. Apart from being merely a repetition of the mistaken 'no distinct identity' assumption mentioned above, this is perfectly illogical. If the issue was that simple, why was any application necessary? Why Cass's 60 'preliminary' pages, let alone his planned 6,000? And why had CUP's 1940 attempt been rejected? Why had the university presses hitherto been liable for corporation tax? Had no-one noticed that they were owned by their universities? There is the technicality too that, strictly speaking, it is not the universities of Oxford and Cambridge which enjoy educational charity status, but their individual colleges, each of which is obliged to file separate accounts; this apparently puts CUP and OUP in an even less certain situation than that of their non-collegiate counterparts.

Then there is the point that if university presses' tax-exemption were reliant solely on their parent charity's status, they would be free to publish whatever they liked, or whatever made them the most money; they could sell tax-free pornography. By the same argument, suppose, to alleviate its poverty, Oxford University were to open a wholly-owned chain of fast food shops in the city (DIM burgers, DIM nuggets, DIM cola, Big DIM and fries to go, so forth), would it expect or be entitled to tax-exemption simply on the grounds that its profits were to go to a seat of learning?

Charities, it is true, are sometimes allowed to run non-charitable trading subsidiaries - the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association Xmas gift catalogue, for example - which can covenant all their profits untaxed back to their parent charity. But firstly the parent body's registration and 'governing document' render all such operations open to public scrutiny, accountability, limitation and constraint. Secondly, the covenanting rules are strict and absolute: there can be no question of amassing surpluses in ill-defined funds, or of using them to finance construction projects (surely, in any case, there must be a hundred better ways to restore Bodley or to buy a new lab? [see preamble and postscripts]), or even to expand indefinitely in the publishing trade. Thirdly, again and as always, it depends upon what the subsidiary actually does. And fourthly, both the particular cases and the general rules are subject to constant revision. I understand, for example, that the charitable National Trust's operation of a chain of untaxed high street gift shops in competition with tax-paying rivals was recently curtailed for exactly these reasons. Perhaps, if properly constituted, OUP's profits could all formally be covenanted in some such way, but one immediate result would presumably be a mass resignation of Walton Street's salaried staff, who see themselves (and are employed) as publishing professionals, not as charity workers. Their morale must already be at an all-time low.

Certain aspects of charity law, however, are absolutely clear: while 'education' may be a recognized charitable aim or purpose, the distribution of books per se - whether for profit or not, and whatever they contain - is not. Even if, implausibly, OUP were able to persuade the Commisioners that teaching the Chinese to speak English is a legitimate charitable aim within the remit of the University of Oxford (in which case it would be a legitimate charitable aim for anyone else), nothing could be inferred from this about the shifting, or flogging, of pallets of paper. The only exception might be where a book directly furthered a specific charitable purpose: The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, which is a registered charity, might, for example, want to distribute a book warning parents about the causes of cot death. This distinction between education and book-trading becomes especially clear in our new Internet Age: if the University's and its Press's aims are purely charitable and educational, why don't they simply download all of their teaching materials onto a free Chinese website? In fact, OUP's electronic ventures so far have been confined to advertising: tempting readers with a book's first chapter in the hope of persuading them to fork out a fee for the rest. By contrast, a perfect example of a truly charitable, educational operation is AKME's own non-profitmaking online Law Library.

Whatever the niceties of the charity law that Cass preferred not to invoke, his 'no separate corporate identity' assertion is in any event now certainly untrue of OUP. In 1987 during my legal action, I discovered that the Press had registered no fewer than thirty-five limited companies, most of which appeared to be non-trading 'dummies'. It seems that around 1984 some rival entrepreneurs had started a publishing business in the city also exploiting the 'Oxford' name, and that OUP had hurriedly bought them out, and registered other similarly tempting titles, in order to protect the 'brand exclusivity' of its own. 'Cattle crossing', I suppose, just doesn't have the same ring to it. Incidentally, an odd, vacuous rigmarole presently appearing on the frontispieces of OUP books goes: "Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press". Again, if OUP has no corporate identity other than The Chancellor... et cetera, what on earth is it doing buying up other commercial publishers right and left, taking over dodgy South American outfits, tying up with shady French wholesalers, and crossing swords with tricky Lebanese middlemen? In my lawsuit, Oxford's city lawyers at one stage described OUP (USA) as "a separate Delaware corporation" whose papers the University was unable to obtain. And could Roy Jenkins even list his thirty overseas subsidiaries?

Next, Cass's letter claimed that every CUP publication had to be individually approved by the Press's governing committee of 'Syndics' (or OUP's 'Delegates'). This, it was said, was no mere formality; all appraisals were academically rigorous, and the Press's salaried staff had no power to accept books themselves. Again, this is certainly untrue of OUP, whose huge General Books Division operates largely free from Delegatorial control. This was another point demonstrated by my court-case, in which the Senior General Books Editor Henry Hardy and the Chief Executive Sir Roger Elliott both testified to the Division's autonomy, the latter referring to the Delegates as merely "retroactive scrutineers". In his American affidavit of 1991, senior Delegate Alan Ryan (now Warden of New College) was especially clear on the point:

"General [as opposed to Academic] books were submitted to the editorial committee for approval, and if approved, then reported on to the Delegates. The Delegates did not have the same role in their approval, because the intellectual name of the Press was not at risk: such books were aimed at the general reader rather than the scholar, and do not carry the academic imprint of the Press."

In fact, many of OUP's moneyspinners now have little to do with Walton Street, which increasingly 'outsources' its projects to independent book packagers. It closed down its own encyclopaedia department, for instance, and now has its 'Oxford' books assembled by a firm in Aylesbury, with controversial results. Amongst the post-poetry chorus of public complaint about OUP's falling editorial standards, the former managing editor of The Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia observed that in its subsequently culled paperback version, Czech literature now gets greater coverage than English. [See also Intifada] Conversely, Oxford's newly-launched Atlas of the World's Religions was produced by a London packager whose work was excellent but had nothing to do with OUP; Walton Street's only contribution to the book was its hilariously bungled dustjacket displaying a third-century Gandharan Buddhist sculpture of Princess Diana.

Every CUP publication, Cass further insisted, was approved solely on the grounds of its contribution to the advancement of knowledge, education or religion, purposes recognised as charitable under the Acts. Whatever their truth, these were interesting claims, for they implicitly conceded that the validity of the Press's sought tax-exemption would depend directly upon the quality and content of the books that it published. While many of OUP's publications undoubtedly do still fulfill these criteria, increasing numbers certainly do not, and in his TLS creed Keith Thomas himself laments the dwindling of the scholarly monograph market. One wonders, for example, how his own Oxford Book of Work [nice if you can get it] or Oxford's scratch 'n' sniff Smelly Old Histories: Medieval Muck would today convince the Inland Revenue's Special Commissioners, now cast as they are by their ad hoc decision into the unlikely role of educational-book-quality monitors.

It was argued too that CUP's Syndics (and OUP's Delegates), unlike the directors of a company, were appointed by a nominating committee, were unpaid, and had no personal financial interest in their Press. Strictly speaking this may be true, but given that all are paid, and some handsomely so, by the charitable University in which they hold office, the point has a certain disreputable circularity. Another assertion made by Cass was that because of its peculiar constitutional status, CUP could never be bought, sold or taken over, but in OUP's case this too was given the lie in 1987 when a group of Oxford dons proposed selling a 49 percent stake in their then-failing Press to Robert Maxwell.

The keystone, however, of Cass's application, the assurance that kept all the others in place, was that any 'surpluses' made by the Press (charities are not allowed to make 'profits') would be ploughed back into further scholarly, educational and religious publishing and be set aside only as necessary to ensure the Press's continuing viability. It was expressly stated that 'profit' as such was not to be considered or required by the Syndicate of any publication, and that the Press had always recognised as its prime function the publication of works which commercial firms would not undertake, a point that will not be lost on Oxford's exiled poets, sacked music department, or the eminent academic whose promised OUP reprinting was recently refused because it was unlikely to achieve its 1,500 annual sales target. It is ironic that the university which so self-righteously snubbed Margaret Thatcher should finally have admitted what its ears find most truly musical and poetic.

By corollary, CUP's application continued, the University would make no call upon any cash reserves which its Press might accrue, and Cass expressly disowned as 'errant' its last signficant benefaction, the endowment of the Pitt Professorship back in 1944. By modern contrast, the word 'profit' is now happily and openly bandied - flaunted even, and Keith Thomas feels free explicitly to disavow such an idealistic ethos, declaring instead that "OUP has to make a reasonable financial return to its owner." Oxford's Delegates are proud of their £160 million nest-egg (1999/2000), which seems to have been announced almost as a challenge.

Lawyers may at this point be interested to learn that the chief legal authority hypothetically relied upon by Cass was an appeal for charitable status successfully made four years earlier by a team of (less than twenty) law reporters, and without going too deeply into the minutiae of charity law, a glance at the other similar claims therein cited - the City of Glasgow Police Athletic Association, for instance - leads at least this lay-lawyer to doubt the relevance of such a case to the business operations of an international general publisher which has over 1,200 staff on its payroll and whose annual turnover is presently hitting £300 million.

This prompts some entertaining speculation as to what might happen were the issue ever to be properly examined and resolved, by a court, say, or by the Charity or Inland Revenue Commissioners. As in my case, where non-Oxford judiciary had to be specially recruited, only senior, non-partisan adjudicators would be eligible, with alumni from Oxford or Cambridge being automatically barred, and doubtless the field of candidates being thereby greatly narrowed. The corollary, of course, may help to explain why the present anomaly persists.

Two final points should also be noted. Firstly CUP did not, apparently, have very high hopes of its application succeeding, for during the years it was in preparation and under consideration, the Syndics set aside a fund of the notional tax they would be obliged to pay if it failed; it was the sudden release of this money that financed their construction from 1977 of the Press's massive new Edinburgh building and Shaftesbury Road complex, completed in 1981. Secondly, throughout his submission, Cass repeatedly contrasted CUP's scale, lists, circumstances and policies with those of OUP, which he publicly disparaged as being "not purely a university press". He actually went out of his way to stress that the uniqueness of CUP's history and ethos meant that a decision in its favour would create no precedent with respect to any other university press. Notwithstanding Cass's view, OUP's similar application, again by backdoor letter, again in virtual secrecy, and now based on the precedent of CUP's conditional exemption, was granted on the nod a year later in 1978, a fact which goes oddly unrecorded in any of OUP's own self-histories.

The result of all this is that, THES strapline notwithstanding, the university presses in general, and OUP in particular, do not, strictly speaking, enjoy the status of charitable trusts after all, having never applied for such status, but are merely in possession, or proxy-possession, of kind but vulnerable letters from their nearby taxmen. (Most university presses, remember, both here and in America, are by contrast subsidised by their universities.) If OUP had true charitable status, its notepaper would have to display not some measly mission-statement, but its registration number. And the answer to the THES's general question is that if any university press were to apply to the Charity Commissioners in the normal way, its case might - and only might - have a chance of overcoming the basic 'trading in the open market' objection if it fufilled the sort of conditions lengthily listed by Cass, especially his keystone requirement of ploughing any 'surplus' it makes back into non-commercial publishing like poetry. Whatever else, OUP's £20 million-a-year cash-cowing would certainly disqualify it.

In an archaic whine reminiscent of Sir Roger Elliott's fine 'public apology' in my own Court of Appeal hearing (see Judgment, Mustill LJ, p.43 ) Geoffrey Cass concluded his 1975 'preliminary letter' with a quotation from a 1614 order of the Lords of the Privy Council:

"Forasmuch as learning hath antiently had this spetiall favour and priviledge, that upon any occasion of grievance, or complaint offered unto the Two Universities of this Realme, whensoever they have made their immediate recourse to the King or his Councell for speedie redresse and for avoyding length and charges of suit in an ordinary legal proceeding of Justice, they have never beene refused, but allwayes gratiously accepted."

Ye case resteth.

November 1998 - February 1999: The poetry fiasco. OUP axes its Modern poetry list to save, allegedly, just £20,000 per annum. Sample articles (more in Akme's Oxford Cuttings Library): Anger over dead poets society The Times, 21/11/98; Neither rhyme nor reason The Guardian, 24/11; Beware the Philistines of publishing The Times, 25/11; Oxford's poets fall foul of the bottom line The Independent, 27/11; Poetic Injustice, The Telegraph 28/11; Vandalism Oxford Magazine, 4/12; Minister attacks dons as 'barbaric' The Independent, 4/2/99 speech by Arts Minister Alan Howarth, who warns that OUP's 'charitable status' is compromised; Mammon's Imprint The Times Higher (Education Supplement), 12/2 comment by Oxford Eng. Lit. Prof. Valentine Cunningham, including THES leader comment and launch of 'soapbox' debate on OUP's 'charitable status'; The Purpose and the Cost The Times Literary Supplement, 5/2 'justification' of poetry-axing by OUP Finance Committee chairman Sir Keith Thomas; The War for Jericho The Times Literary Supplement, 2/4 response by Andrew Malcolm to preceding article: why the present 'charitable' constitution of the OUP is unsustainable.

July 1999: OUP announces £87 million 'donation'. OUP to invest £87 million in university The Times 17/7/99 plus leader comment and reactions.

October 1999: Publication of The Remedy. As explained, the above essay formed The Remedy's 5th Appendix. To launch the book, AKME printed 25,000 leaflets for (contracted) distribution by The Oxford Star, headlining the following three facts:

• In 1978 OUP was granted UK tax-exemption on condition (a) that any surplus it makes is ploughed back into unprofitable publishing (like poetry) and (b) that it does not fund the university.
• In 1998 OUP axed its Modern Poetry list for "insufficient profitability".
• By 1999 OUP had amassed reserves of over £140 million.

Following up the second Cherwell article, I telephoned the Oxford University Public Relations Office to learn more about OUP's "generous donation" and was informed by Director Helen Carasso that its £60 million, in two annual tranches of £30 million, was not actually a donation at all, but rather an underwriting of the two projects (the restoration of the Bodleian Library and the building of a new chemistry faculty) necessary to ensure their initiation. Once the projects were underway, other funds would most likely be raised (and in the case of the chemistry faculty an alternative £30 million had by then already been raised). See also The Bodley Theme-Park Fiasco, aka 'Greatgate'.

January 2001: OUP finally loses its 25-year battle for charitable status in India. Indian Court of Appeal, SOL Case No. 053. Click for The Indian Court Archive version (contains a number of typographical errors; link takes you out of www.akme) or for the Akme (corrected) version. As a result, OUP (India) owed debts to the Indian Government stretching back to 1973 and totalling about 150 million rupees (roughly £2 million). It paid these off by selling off its Mumbai headquarters 'Oxford House' (click for photo). Also click for newspaper articles: The Bookseller, 16/3; OUP facing huge tax bill The Oxford Mail, 21/3/01; A Message from India The Oxford Times, 30/3/01: This in-depth report includes an admission by university spokeswoman Philippa Corson that OUP's 1999 'donations' remained "unallocated".

April 2001 - February 2002: Malcolm vs. Oxford II Hostilities renewed, thanks to a breach of the 1992 settlement agreement by Alan Ryan, the New College Warden. Click for explanation.

May - June 2002: Malcolm opens AKME EXPRESSION in Oxford. 30th May Alan Ryan quits Oxford, in full rant mode. Letter in The Oxford Magazine, 14th June suggests "OUP could be sold off (after clawing back that £100 million of reserves)... and banished it to a shiny shed on a local business park."

August 2003: OUP announces further donation of £77 million for the purchase of the John Radcliffe Infirmary on Woodstock Road, for conversion to student accommodation. Click for A Palpable Hit? and for the Oxford Mail and Times reports. It is claimed in OUP's 2002/3 accounts that since 1999 (the publication of The Remedy), the traditionally skinflint OUP has altogether unloaded over £200 million of its illegally amassed reserves.

First-ever public querying (by Joel Rickett) in a UK national newspaper of OUP's tax-exemption: The Guardian 30/8/03.

January 2005: The University asserts (a challenge?) that its finances are now so parlous that its solvency actually relies on its annual £20 million slice of OUP's illegal profits. Click for The Times, 24/1/05.

March/April 2007 Lead news story in The Bookseller and report in The Guardian: CHARITIES REVIEW COULD HIT PUBLISHERS: Giant OUP may be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Click for Touch me minky and Please touch me minky.

The source for much of the above history, originally concerning Cambridge University Press, is M. H. Black's Cambridge University Press 1584-1984 (CUP), Chapter 15 Charitable status recognised (1976). Click also for the Law Reporters' Case which Cass claimed as his precedent, or for The other case references therein cited. For some relevant charity law cases and other materials and links, go to the AKME Law Library.

New posting, Autumn 2006 As far as is known, the only printed acknowledgment by OUP of the facts concerning its tax exemption appears as a small 'Supplementary Note' to the Delegates' Annual Report of 1978. Akme has now obtained and posted as a linked series, the Annual Reports covering this interesting period 1976/7 (pre-exemption) with Akme Introduction, 1977/8, 1978/9, and 1979/80.

Various related newspaper articles: Oxbridge accounts reveal assets of £2 billion The Sunday Times, 16/11/97; OUP fights corner in poetry row The Times Higher (Education Supplement), 12/2/99 (includes CUP's donations to CU), US presses enjoy tax freedom.

A further result of The Remedy's publication, was Akme being informed that OUP (USA) was the subject of a complaint to the IRS by one of its tax-paying competitors, who had catalogued OUP Inc's numerous sharp practices in an attempt to get its privilege revoked. In May 2000, Akme was sent photocopies of OUP's sensitive, all-important American tax-exemption applications, which reveal that its original, dubious 37-line 'justification' of 1972 had been whittled down to just a single untrue sentence. Click for OUP's U.S. Tax-exemption including its applications, transcriptions, summary of accounts (1997), and a U.S. lawyers' Briefing Paper on the subject.

Click also for OUP's South African saga, including the interesting 1994 non-charitable judgment of Justice Berman:

"It matters not what the source of that income is, whether it is obtained by way of the praiseworthy activities of the OUP or whether the OUP obtained its income from the sale of run-of-the-mill thrillers, science-fiction or love stories aimed at a market comprising the least discriminating of readers; taken to its logical conclusion it matters not one whit if the OUP limited its commercial activities to carrying on the business of a supermarket or of a department store or a franchised outlet for Kentucky Fried Chicken - provided that its surplus funds are paid over to and used by a school or college or like institution which to some degree is controlled from South Africa..." [echoes of The Remedy's 5th Appendix?]

Click for the OUP ACCOUNTS INDEX, The Delegates' Annual Reports and Financial Abstracts, 1994 - 2006, and Bookseller digests, 1988 - 1999. OUP's latest accounts 2005/06. Also OUP Delegates lists.

Click for The Waldock Report, Oxford University's own resonant 1970, pre-tax-exempt investigation into the workings of its Press, including many interesting references to its taxation.

Click for Charity Law Shake-up. Government report, September 2002, has implications for Oxbridge colleges and presses. The Guardian 19/11/01; Accountancy Age 29/11; Oxford Student 21/11. Also Oxbridge accounts reveal assets of £2 billion The Sunday Times, 16/11/97.