FOI Tribunal Forces Oxford to Disclose Endowment's Elbit Systems and Rolls-Royce Holdings

A London tribunal spent two days last week weighing a question Oxford University Endowment Management (OUEM) spent nearly two years trying not to answer: does the public have a right to know where the university's £4.2 billion central endowment is invested.

The case traces back to May 2024, when Oxford climate scientist Dr Ellen Dyer filed a Freedom of Information request asking OUEM to disclose the Oxford Endowment Fund's (OEF) holdings in three companies on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign's target list: Elbit Systems, Rolls-Royce Holdings, and Caterpillar. Elbit is Israel's largest arms manufacturer. Rolls-Royce supplies engines and power-pack systems used by the Israeli military, according to the BDS campaign's characterization. Caterpillar's heavy equipment has long been used in the demolition of Palestinian homes.

OUEM refused to confirm or deny it held the information. The Information Commissioner's Office upheld that refusal. Dyer appealed.

Then, in January 2026, ten months before the tribunal hearing, OUEM disclosed the numbers anyway: the OEF held roughly £16,000 in Elbit Systems and £150,000 in Rolls-Royce at the time of Dyer's request, and nothing in Caterpillar.

With the figures already public, last week's hearing turned on principle rather than content. OUEM's barrister, Robin Hopkins, argued that disclosing details of this kind risks exposing the strategies of the third-party fund managers who handle OEF money, and could deter top managers from working with Oxford at all.

"If the door closed on us by a small number or even one, that would be harmful," Hopkins told the tribunal.

OUEM's general counsel, Neil Hayes, said the fund seeks the "ruby in the dust" of competitive fund managers, a strategy he credited with returns of five percent above inflation.

Dyer's barrister, Tom Tabori, countered that OUEM's evidence for this risk amounted to a single email, sent in December 2025 by a fund manager who had learned of the dispute and wanted to stress he valued confidentiality. Tabori pressed OUEM on why, if disclosure was so damaging, it released the figures voluntarily months before the hearing.

"If you were willing to disclose it in Jan 2026, presumably you should have been willing to disclose it in May 2024," Tabori said.

OUEM maintained the information had simply ceased to be commercially sensitive by that point. Tabori argued the public interest in debating where a multibillion-pound fund tied to a public institution invests should outweigh any residual risk to fund manager relationships.

Dyer's request was one of more than 150 filed by the Oxford BDS Coalition since October 2023, part of a broader campaign to map the university's exposure to arms manufacturers and firms linked to the occupation. The coalition says its FOI campaign has surfaced indirect investments worth more than £19 million across 49 companies it says have been flagged by the UN and human rights groups over activity in the occupied territories, routed through a passive equity tracker fund the university developed with BlackRock in 2020. Those figures have not been independently verified and remain the coalition's own accounting rather than a tribunal finding.

The tribunal's ruling on the broader transparency question is still pending.