Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oxford University Press, or OUP, is the publishing house of the University of Oxford and the largest university press in the world. It operates as a department of the university, governed by 15 academics called the Delegates of the Press, who are appointed by the vice-chancellor and led by a Secretary to the Delegates acting as chief executive.
Oxford printed its first known book in 1478 and became a steady printer of Bibles, prayer books, and scholarly works by around 1480. A royal decree gave Oxford the formal legal right to print in 1586, and the 1636 Great Charter, won by Archbishop William Laud, granted the right to print "all manner of books."
James Murray and the Philological Society estimated the Oxford English Dictionary would take ten years and cost about 9,000 pounds when Secretary Bartholomew Price took on the project in 1879. It actually took until 1928 to finish its first edition, 13 years after Murray's death, at a cost of around 375,000 pounds.
OUP broke an international embargo to attend the Tehran Book Fair in April 1989, months after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. OUP said staying away "certainly wasn't in our interests, or Iran's as a whole," a decision condemned by The New York Times and The Sunday Times.
In July 2012, the UK's Serious Fraud Office fined OUP 1.9 million pounds after finding its Kenya and Tanzania branches guilty of bribery to win World Bank-funded school bookselling contracts. OUP was also barred from applying for World Bank-financed projects for three years.
In March 2001, after a 28-year dispute, India's Supreme Court ruled that OUP was not tax exempt because it acted "simply as a commercial publisher" rather than carrying out university activities there. OUP had to sell its Mumbai headquarters building, Oxford House, to settle back taxes owed since the 1970s.