A judge has ruled that Oxford University could maintain the anonymity of donor with ties to Azerbaijan’s ruling family. The ruling from July ended a months-long legal struggle with news website openDemocracy, which revealed a £10m donation to the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre.
The judge said: “The [University] has a committee and a process in place for just this purpose and in this case after careful scrutiny it found no issues that would render the donation unwelcome.”
In December, openDemocracy filed a Freedom of Information request to Oxford “asking for the identity of the donor and copies of communications around the handling of the donation.” But the University refused to disclose the information, citing commercial interests that could be harmed by the information being disclosed as well as data protection concerns.
However, it revealed that the donation came from Azerbaijan and that the person behind it was a “highly successful businessperson who wished to remain anonymous.” The University has also made known that the donation was “facilitated” by Azerbaijan president’s sister-in-law.
Consequently, openDemocracy contested the case with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which earlier last month sided with Oxford.
Alexander Morrison, interim director of the Nizami Ganjavi Centre, told Cherwell that the University is “mistaken” in accepting the anonymity: “The question of the donor’s identity has ended up overshadowing all the good work that the centre actually does in funding independent, high-quality academic research on the Caucasus and Central Asia.”
The initial report by OpenDemocracy found that Oxford accepted by far the highest amount of anonymous donations since 2017 – £106m from just 68 donors – out of the 24 Russell Group universities that collectively received more than £281m.
Notably, in April of this year eight Oxford academics joined more than 120 academics, campaigners, politicians and journalists to publish an open letter calling for legislation requiring universities to publish a register of large donations and research funding. OpenDemocracy’s findings, along with fears relating to Chinese influence on UK universities, were a driving force behind a campaign for stricter disclosure rules for universities.
A spokesperson from the University told Cherwell: “Donors have no influence over how Oxford academics carry out their research, and major donors are reviewed and approved by the University’s Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding, which is a robust, independent system.”
In June of 2023, MPs did not pass legislation to ensure UK universities would publish the names of any foreign donor who gave a university more than £50,000.
