The University of Oxford prides itself on high ethical and reputational standards for its donors and funding. The list of scholarships offered at the University is long and comprehensive, but how transparent is it who the people behind them are? Alastair Tulloch, the trustee of Hill Foundation which supports a scholarship at University of Oxford, has managed to balance his role with running a firm that set up and managed offshore companies for sanctioned Russian officials and businessmen.
The Hill Foundation Scholarship is a programme that supports Russian nationals and residents pursuing a second bachelor’s degree, full-time master’s or DPhil. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, around ten scholarships per year have been awarded to students.
The scholarship fully covers fees and also provides a grant towards living costs. It has supported 56 graduate scholars over the past 5 years. One of the scholarship’s eligibility criteria is that students should intend to leave the UK upon completing their degree. Whether this means that students would have to return to Russia is unclear.
One of the three named trustees of the Hill Foundation is Alastair Tulloch, a lawyer who has reportedly been involved in multiple financial schemes, such as the purchase of Whitehall flats for Igor Shuvalov, former First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He is also the only trustee listed in the contacts section of the Foundation’s website. Cherwell discovered that a range of companies linked to Russian oligarchs with minimal online presence have Tulloch as one of their directors and share the address with the Hill Foundation.
University and ethical donorship
More than three years have passed since Russia launched a full-scale invasion on Ukraine. There have been over 40,000 civilian casualties, and 3.7 million people are internally displaced with 6.9 million fleeing Ukraine. Many countries including the UK, US, and EU have imposed sanctions on Russian gas and oil, but also personally on individuals who support the war.
According to the register of charities, Tulloch is the oldest standing trustee for the foundation, having been appointed in May 2007. As a trustee, he is partially responsible for awarding the scholarships to the candidates “who demonstrate extremely high academic ability and personal and social qualities of a high order”, according to the University website.
The other two trustees are Professor John Nightingale at Magdalen College, appointed in February 2022, and Professor Catriona Kelly at New College, appointed in May 2008.
The University Freedom of Information (FOI) Officer told Cherwell: “We have not discovered any correspondence concerning UK sanctions against Russia and the appearance of Alistair Tulloch in the Pandora files or other investigations.”
Other scholarships supporting Russian students have been under pressure since the beginning of the war. The Chevening Scholarship, a fully-funded UK government programme priding itself in supporting “emerging leaders”, was suspended for Russian residents in 2022. The decision to reinstate it for Russian students received backlash due to concerns that such education benefits Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Meanwhile, the absence of communication regarding the sanctions, as FOI’s show, between the University and Hill Foundation means the reassessment of compliance to the University’s policy on ethical donorship has not been conducted.
Better Call Tulloch
Tulloch is a founding partner of TGW Law, a firm focusing on corporate transactions and reorganisations, investment funds, and UK charities. TGW Law and its address frequently appear in the financial paper trail of Russian investments with links to government officials and oligarchs.
Tulloch is a director of at least 5 companies and has been a secretary or a director of more than 50 companies and charities in the past. A significant number of these companies have minimal online presence and share the same office and communications address as the Hill Foundation and Tulloch’s law firm.
TGW Law appears in a leak of over 6.4 million documents, around three million images, over a million emails and almost half-a-million spreadsheets obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) – the Pandora Papers. These revealed numerous international networks of companies set up across borders and hiding ownership of assets.
According to the leaks, TGW Law firm assisted with the management of offshore companies for former Russian Deputy Finance Minister Andrey Vavilov who served under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Vitaly Zhogin, a banker wanted in Russia for alleged fraud. His firm also structured a network of companies for Alexander Mamut, a Russian billionaire who was included in the ‘Putin List’, a US Treasury Department list of 210 Russian political and business figures and has faced US sanctions since 2018.
Tulloch was also linked to Igor Shuvalov’s real estate purchases. Igor Shuvalov served as the First Deputy Prime Minister in both Putin’s and Medvedev’s administrations and is currently the Chair of the Russian state development corporation VEB.RF. He has been sanctioned by the US, EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The University spokesperson responded to the questions about Alastair Tulloch’s position in the Foundation to Cherwell: “All donors are subject to our policies on the acceptance of gifts, and all significant donors and funders must be approved by the University’s Committee to Review Donations and Research Funding, which is a robust, independent system taking legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration.”
Cozy offices in Mayfair town house
Two addresses keep appearing in the records of a number of foundations linked to Russian businessmen, 4 Hill Street and 46 Laurier Road. For over 60 companies, they are listed as either correspondence addresses or registered offices. Cherwell has independently verified that the buildings at those addresses appear to be small London town houses, and unlikely to be large enough to headquarter that number of separate offices.
Tulloch’s firm TGW Law is also registered at 4 Hill Street, and so is the Hill Foundation. Cherwell understands that the foundation which supports the Oxford scholarship takes its name from this address.
Many of the companies that Tulloch was a director of have minimal online presence. A number of them are connected to Russian businessmen such as Alexander Mamut, Evgeny Lebedev, or Yury Milner. There is no public information regarding who the donors of Hill Foundation are. This absence of transparency raises many questions about the people behind the scholarship.
A humble flat for Shuvalov
Shuvalov, Putin’s former Deputy Prime Minister, was the richest member of the government in 2012, according to government records owning a house in Austria, seven cars, and a number of flats in Russia. In 2018 Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation revealed that Shuvalov used a £38 million secret private jet to fly his wife’s Corgis to the UK.
In 2018 Alexei Navalny, Russian political activist and head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, uncovered Shuvalov’s 483m2 flat worth £11.4 million in Whitehall Court, a 19th century Westminster luxury apartment block. The records, such as applications for listed building consent, show the flat was owned by a number of different offshore companies, including Central Cove Ltd. Central Cove Ltd. also shared the address with Hill Foundation and Tulloch’s law firm.
This, however, was not the end of Tulloch’s law firm involvement in “fixing” the housing for Shuvalov. In 2014 the flat was bought by Sova Real Estate LLC, a company owned by Shuvalov and his wife Olga. During registration of the company, the due diligence was conducted by none other than Tulloch & Co (now known as TGW law) and the person with overall responsibility was Alastair Tulloch.
Ex-KGB Spy and Boris Johnson’s friend
Cherwell has also found that Tulloch was one of the directors of the Lebedev Foundation, before the company dissolved. However, the 14 years at Lebedev Foundation does not conclude Tulloch’s business relationship with the Russian-British businessman. Tulloch was a director of the Journalism Foundation together with Evgeny Lebedev from 2011 to 2013. Finally, Tulloch was a secretary of an obscure company El Private Office Limited, which was directed by Evgeny Lebedev.
Evgeny Lebedev is an investor in The Independent, and the owner of The Evening Standard. He received life peerage from Boris Johnson, which received criticism considering Lebedev’s father, Alexander Lebedev’s past as a KGB agent. According to the chair of the House of Lords, Lebedev’s nomination for peerage was paused after MI5 advice, but approved with a note that the appointment would be controversial. Channel 4’s documentary has alleged that government officials asked Queen Elizabeth to block Evgeny Lebedev’s peerage.
Evgeny Lebedev’s influence on the UK government and particularly Boris Johnson was a subject for concern of many. Boris Johnson was criticised for meeting in private with the businessmen and his father, an ex-KGB agent. However, Lebedev himself denies there was “security risk” to the meeting. Tulloch’s professional relationship with the Lebedev family seems all too similar to his other relationships with Russian businessmen close to power.
Matryoshka of shell companies
Trustees of scholarships like Hill Foundation have the ultimate say in who receives the financial awards. Connections to a range of Russian officials and businessmen and a track record of involvement of his company in setting up shell companies to conceal identity of the owners of assets reflect the deeper link of Tulloch to the so-called world of ‘Londongrad’.
The scholarships support the education of people who, as Hill Foundation website puts it, will “work for the betterment of Russian life and culture”. What kind of ‘betterment’ do the trustees with links to sanctioned officials and shady businessmen have in mind? This remains unclear, as Tulloch did not respond to Cherwell’s comment requests.
The paper trail of a number of charities and companies leading to 4 Hill Street highlights the strong connection between Tulloch and Russian oligarchs in London. It is unclear who the key donors for the foundation are, as neither the website is transparent on whose donation established the foundation nor is the University. Whether the University will conduct a reassessment of the ethical and reputational standards following a range of investigations in Tulloch’s operations remains unclear as well.
The University receiving funds from reputationally dubious donors and foundations has raised concerns in the past. Cherwell reported on Potanin, Russian oligarch and Putin’s ‘hockey buddy’, donating $150,000 to the Said Business School in 2017 for a fellowship.
Alastair Tulloch and the University of Oxford have been approached for comment.
