MYSTERY surrounds the departure of top manager Bill Andrewes from Oxford University Press.

Staff were told in a brief internal memo that Mr Andrewes, the managing director of English Language Training (ELT), had "stepped down".

He has worked for the company for 24 years.

Peter Mothersole, former director of the international division, which manages overseas branches of OUP, has become the new managing director of ELT.

Now OUP, Britain's oldest publishing house, will advertise for a new director of the international division.

OUP spokesman Caroline Paling declined to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the changes.

Henry Reece took over as chief executive in August this year after OUP reported that pre-tax profits for the year to March 31, 1998, had been halved from £26.7m last year to just £13.04m. The company blamed the Asian crisis and the strong pound.

Restructuring costs in recently-acquired Latin American companies plus worldwide costs of introducing computer software to resist the Millennium bug also contributed to the disappointing results.

Recently, the ELT division has been involved in a dispute with the French Foreign Book Importers Association (Alile) and some booksellers in France have staged a boycott of OUP books.

Alile claimed that the appointment last year of wholesaler Societe Internationale de Diffusion et d'Edition (Side) as sole distributor contravened Article 85 of the Treaty of Rome.

Alile claimed it was unfair for OUP to appoint a competitor as sole distributor, but OUP said that Side ceased to sell directly to retailers when it became sole distributor in France.

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