bcc- PS/PUS
Foreign & Commonwealth
Office
14 August 1992
Sir Kenneth Stowe
The Institute of Cancer Research
17a Onslow Gardens
London
SW7 3AL
London SWIA 2AH
Was 785
785/1
дон
Lear for Kamell,
THE ESTATE OF THE LATE SIR S K TANG
David Gillmore, who is away on leave, has asked me to thank you for your letter of 6 August about this bequest. I well understand your wish to see this matter sorted out soon. So do we, I assure you.
The root of our problem lies in the complexities of dealing with a gift to which no legal modalities were attached by the donor.
There is no mention of this bequest in
Sir S K Tang's will. But he made his intentions clear in a letter to the Chief Secretary of Hong Kong written in March 1986, in which he proposed to donate a sum of one million pounds sterling "as a Foundation Fund, from which the interest accrued is to be used for charitable purposes in the United Kingdom, at the complete discretion of Her Majesty's Government". From subsequent correspondence it emerged that Sir S K Tang favoured using two-thirds of the interest for funding scholarships for Hong Kong students to study in the United Kingdom and giving the remaining third of the interest to a medical charity such as cancer research. This is not expressed in any legal form, but we have been assured we can safely regard it as a true expression of his wishes. Since Sir S K Tang did not want to get involved in setting up a Trust, he handed over a cheque to the Hong Kong Government in June 1986, shortly before he died. It was placed in a sterling account in Hong Kong and is held there on behalf of HMG.
Our aim has been to set up a Trust in this country to administer the funds in accordance with Sir S K Tang's wishes. But we have been having great difficulty in establishing the appropriate legal mode for doing this. The Department has been engaged in a protracted series of dialogues with a variety of correspondents, including the Treasury, the Hong Kong
/Administration
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