Bikini airline tycoon in £155m legal battle
Billionaire businesswoman who won renaming deal with Oxford college denies breach of lease agreement
‘[Vietnam] had some reaction from their supporters complaining about money going to a rich country’
THE “bikini airline” tycoon who pledged the biggest ever donation to an Oxford college is at the centre of a £155million High Court legal claim, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao’s VietJet is being sued for allegedly failing to keep up payments on leased aircraft.
Last year, Linacre College announced that in exchange for a “landmark gift” from Sovico Group, it would change its name to Thao College, after Ms Thao, the company’s chairwoman and the only female billionaire in south-east Asia. Sovico is the parent company of VietJet, which Ms Thao launched in 2007 as the first privately run, low-cost airline in Vietnam. It became known as the “bikini airline” after an advertising campaign featuring bikini-clad flight attendants.
A decade later, Ms Thao, 52, took the company public and became a billionaire. She is now general director of VietJet and chairman of Sovico, which invests in a number of real estate and energy projects.
Papers filed at the High Court’s commercial division reveal VietJet is being sued for £155million plus interest at a rate of at least £31,000 per day.
The claim, filed by FW Aviation (Holdings) 1 Limited, states VietJet leased four aircraft but fell into arrears after failing to make a series of rental payments in 2021.
In its defence, VietJet admitted it fell into arrears but blamed this on “cash flow problems” owing to the pandemic and lockdown. But it denied it was in breach of the lease agreement, and denied that it owed “any of the relief claimed”.
Last November, Linacre College declared with great fanfare that Ms Thao had pledged via her company to donate £155 million.
But the first tranche of £50 million is now almost six months overdue. Sources with knowledge of the deal say it is considered to be “dead in the water” and claim the Vietnamese government has put a temporary block on the funds.
Linacre College was founded in 1962 and is named after humanist and physician Thomas Linacre, who was born in Canterbury in the mid-15th century.
Ms Thao said last November that Oxford was “the right place to make my long-time desire to contribute to humanity through education, training and research come true”.
A source claimed that the Vietnamese government had put a block on the transfer of money.
They added: “The likely reason was that they had some reaction from their supporters in Vietnam, who had been complaining about that amount of money going out of Vietnam, which is a poor country, to a rich Western country”.
Earlier this year, the Government launched an investigation into the donation, after Dr Julian Lewis MP warned Ms Thao was “extremely close to the Vietnamese communist government”. But the investigation ended with Department for Education (DfE) officials praising the level of due diligence undertaken by Linacre College.
David Seale, Linacre College’s bursar, said: “We are working with Sovico and their financial advisers to develop processes for the transfer of funds that are transparent, auditable and meet with all the legal requirements of both UK and Vietnamese governments.
“Following productive face-to-face meetings in Vietnam we are now putting all the relevant processes and paperwork in place to transfer the funds.”