The Oxford English Dictionary definition of a charity is "giving voluntarily to those in need". The dictionary's publisher, Oxford University Press, as a Department of the University, is itself a charity - and hence exempt from paying tax in the UK and several other countries.
But now it is counting the cost of a lost court case which means that it must repay a "substantial sum" of tax on profits made in India since 1973.
The press argues that its publishing activities are in direct pursuit of the university's charitable aims.
Following the arrival of a new chief executive, Mr Henry Reece, a former executive with media group Pearson, the company notched up growth of 104 percent last year, with its turnover of £324 million making it the second largest UK publisher after Macmillan. In the league table of UK publishers produced by the trade magazine The Bookseller, OUP reported the highest operating profit of any UK publisher. For the year to March 2000, its profit more than doubled to £32.6 million.
But any profit is labelled as a "net surplus" and ploughed into the university. Last year the press transferred £54 million to the university for its capital reserves, which total several hundred million pounds.
However, the donations did not help OUP's case in India, where the Supreme Court ruled that OUP is not tax-exempt in the sub-continent because it does not carry out any university activities there, but operates simply as a commercial publisher.
OUP spokeswoman Ms Caroline Scotter Mainprize said: "We are studying the recent judgment of our tax status in India. Further action, if any, will be taken on the basis of legal advice which we are seeking."
The firm has tax exemption in several other countries, including the USA and South Africa.
Mr Andrew Malcolm, of Brighton, an author and persistent critic of OUP's tax-exempt status, claims it could soon face trouble in other countries.
However, Ms Scotter Mainprize said: "In the US, we file our accounts annually with the Inland Revenue Service.
"Indeed, a number of these filings are now available on Mr Malcolm's website.
"We have no knowledge of any complaint that may have been made against us to the IRS.
Since 1984, when Oxford University Press declined to publish Mr Malcolm's 200,000-word Platonic dialogue Making Names, he has carried out a campaign of attrition.
He sued OUP for breach of contract, saying that the Press had given him a verbal agreement to publish. He lost in the High Court, which found that he had a "strong moral though not a legal commitment". Then in 1990 he went to appeal, risking a huge legal bill, and won. He published the book himself, receiving favourable reviews in the Times Education Supplement and The Spectator.
Mr Malcolm's next work, The Remedy, was the story of the ins (inns? - ed.) and outs of his court victory, which he published through his company AKME Publications.
Meanwhile, Mr Malcolm, an "independent scholar" who taught philosophy at a college in Brighton, was learning html, the language of the Internet. He set up his own website "to help other authors contemplating similar legal action".
Gradually the website expanded into an amazing compilation of cuttings about OUP, widening to include the controversy about last year's plans to drop its poetry list, and even Gordon Brown's remarks about so-called elitism at Oxford University. The attempt by the university to close off the quadrangle of the Old Bodleian is the most recent highlight.
Mr Malcolm said: "It is my passion - my sad little career." But he insists: "Leaving apart my vindictive background - I have got a score to settle - there have been other calls for an end to OUP's charitable status."
Of the Indian Supreme Court decision he said: "It is a victory for common sense. India is a poor country. Oxford is claiming exemption from taxes that would presumably help India's school system. Many people there want to learn English and the big money is in school books.
"Yet the profits are being used to help Oxford University, one of the richest universities in the world, to fund this fantastically privileged life and dinners at All Souls and so on." However, he feels that the decision may have a positive result, in that it could leave OUP free to pursue purely commercial aims - at least in India. "Now the gloves are off they can be tough, and that may not be a bad thing."
He says that last year's £54 million donation to the university was a PR stunt, and asks what the money was used for. A university spokeswoman, Ms Philippa Corson, said the £54 million had stayed in the university coffers and there was no question of it being transferred back to the Press, although she admitted that there was no firm use earmarked for it.*
"The University decided to use part of it to underwrite the new chemistry faculty building, as a guarantee, so that construction work could start. We will continue to use it for capital projects," she said.
"Considerable sums were needed to underwrite Millennium building projects. It will be used as part of the university's capital endowment. There is no firm assignation for it."*
OUP is the world's largest university press, with a presence in more than 50 countries. It employs some 3,700 people worldwide and - as Mr Malcolm points out - publishes in lucrative markets well beyond academic works, such as children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language and business books, as well as its bibles, music, school and college textbooks, dictionaries and reference books.
Mr Malcolm is suitably modest when asked whether his campaigning had any effect on the India court case. "I did get involved slightly last autumn by talking to the Indian Solicitor General. Whether that had any effect on the outcome I don't know, but it was a fine decision."
As the satirical magazine Private Eye put it, OUP boss Mr Henry Reece must be wondering whether his predecessors could have saved him a lot of trouble by publishing Mr Malcolm's book all those years ago.
* This admission, by which OUP's trumpeted 1999 'designations' are conceded to have been bogus, means that this unaccountable pseudo-charity is being allowed to amass huge untaxed, undonated reserves in order to be able to pay off its back-tax-and-interest bills (plus, no doubt, an army of defensive, delaying-tactic lawyers) when its anomalous status finally gets rumbled. Is there a logician in the Oxford house, or a charity lawyer? Hello, hello... - A. M.
Click for the top of this file,
Click for the next item in the Malcolm v Oxford saga (follow-up letter).
Click for OUP facing huge tax bill (Oxford Mail report 21/3/01)
Click for a photo of Oxford House, Mumbai, India, OUP's Indian HQ since 1912, now to be sold to the Taj Hotel to pay off its back tax .
Click for The Indian Supreme Court judgment 24th January 2001 (takes you out of www.akme).
Click for The Remedy + options, for the Oxford Cuttings Library index, for The Surprising Truth about OUP's 'Charitable Status', for OUP's US tax-exemption, for OUP's Accounts, for the Law Library index, for Malcolm v Oxford: The Case Papers, Making Names, or for the history of AKME.
e-mail: akme@btinternet.com