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Bikini Airline is going down.

A High Court judge called out Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao’s company, VietJet, for “egregious” behaviour after it failed to return four planes it hadn’t paid rent on.

Now the “bikini airline” tycoon – once courted by an Oxford college for donations – is facing a multi-million-pound bill after losing the High Court case.

Last month, the High Court in London ruled against VietJet, often called the “bikini airline” for its ads featuring scantily-clad flight attendants. The judge found the airline had breached its contract after leasing four planes but falling behind on payments in 2021, per The Telegraph.

VietJet “conducted and orchestrated a campaign” in an attempt to avoid handing the leased aircrafts back to their owners, according to the High Court judgment that noted that the “misconduct” employed by the company was “egregious”.

Court papers filed in December 2022 revealed that VietJet was being sued for £155 million, with interest piling up at a rate of at least £31,000 a day.

 

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Ms Thao’s company is also facing several court orders related to the ongoing case, with warnings that failing to comply could lead to contempt of court charges, potentially resulting in imprisonment, asset seizures, or fines.

VietJet acknowledged falling behind on rental payments, blaming “cash flow problems” caused by the pandemic and Vietnam’s national lockdown, which forced it to suspend operations, according to its defence. However, the airline denied breaching the lease agreement or owing any of the claimed relief.

Ms Thao made headlines in 2021 when Linacre College announced it would change its name to Thao College after receiving a “landmark gift” of £155 million from Sovico Group. The Oxford college was under investigation over the generous gift from the Vietnamese billionaire chairwoman amid concern over her links to the country’s communist government.

 

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Sovico group is the parent company of VietJet, which Ms Thao launched in 2007 as the first privately run low-cost airline in Vietnam. A decade after taking the company public, she became Southeast Asia’s only female billionaire. Now, Ms Thao is the general director of VietJet and chairman of Sovico Holdings, which invests in a number of real estate and energy projects.

 

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Another High Court hearing is set for early next year to decide how much VietJet will be ordered to pay FW Aviation (Holdings) 1 Limited, with the claims running into several millions of pounds.

The original memorandum of understanding, signed in front of Vietnam’s prime minister, aligned with the Vietnamese government’s push to attract more foreign direct investment. In Oxford, the agreement was seen as the beginning of a new era of “financial security” for one of the university’s poorer colleges. However, the announcement sparked a backlash over the proposed rebranding of the college, which is named after 15th-century Renaissance scholar Thomas Linacre.

Critics questioned why Ms Thao wanted to take millions out of Vietnam, a country with a lower income than the UK.

Pham Quy Tho, a former dean of public policy at the Academy of Policy and Development, told Nikkei Asia: “Vietnam is poor. We need money.”

He said that “nobody could understand where” the money was going.

In October 2022, The Telegraph revealed that the first tranche of £50 million failed to materialise, and then in September last year, Linacre College’s principal confirmed that plans to rename the College had been dropped.

It looks like Ms Thao is dropping the ball more than catching it.

[source:telegraph]