A US$188 million pledge to Oxford college from Vietjet’s CEO Thao Phuong Thi Nguyen has been put on ice due to legal constraints around moving the money out of Vietnam, The Telegraph is reporting. The donation would have seen Oxford’s Linacre College renamed Thao College after the donor.
It’s not clear how or why this arrangement was forged in the first place. Vietjet doesn’t fly to the UK and Nguyen has no clear connection to the university which is one of the most prestigious in the world. Ostensibly it seems to have been a play for status, however, the original announcement wasn’t well received in Vietnam with a lot of people perplexed as to why a developing country would donate to one of the most developed.