Blair government pressured Oxford to admit Saif Gaddafi

TONY BLAIR'S government tried to pressure Oxford University into giving Saif Gaddafi, the son of the former Libyan dictator, a place at the august institution, a report by Lord Woolf states.
 
In 2002 a senior official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) lobbied Professor Valpy FitzGerald, head of the university's department for International Development, to accept Saif into a master’s degree course in developmental economics or development studies.
 
Fitzgerald protested that Saif "had no social science training and his degree did not meet the requisite quality standard", and said he was not up to the usual standard of applicants to Oxford.
 
Faced with Fitzgerald's opposition, the FCO quietly dropped the matter, according to Woolf's report, which was commissioned to explore how another institution, the London School of Economics (LSE), came to accept a £1.5m donation from Saif.
 
Woolf, a former Lord Chief Justice, concluded that the LSE had "tied its reputation to Colonel Gaddafi's Libya without basic checks on the huge risks involved", says the Times. There was evidence the donation was sourced from bribes paid by foreign businesses looking to secure contracts in the oil-rich African state.  
 
Woolf says that by taking the money - which was formally accepted on the day that Saif gained a doctorate from the university - the LSE opened itself to the charge that the Libyan dictator's son had bought his Phd - though the report did not recommend stripping him of his doctorate.
 
The affair has seriously damaged the reputation of the LSE and prompted director Sir Howard Davies to resign in March this year. ·