changed from a federal structure to a confederation of independent institutions, allowing those individual institutions which had gained the status of universities in their own right to use the title of university – these institutions are Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Glyndŵr University (formerly the North East Wales Institute of Higher Education (NEWI)), Swansea Metropolitan University and Swansea University. In November 2008, Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea Universities decided to exercise their right to register students to study for their own awarded degrees. Scandal and merger In 2010 the university broke its links with a Malaysian college after it was discovered its director had bogus qualifications, while a Thai institution linked to the university was found to be operating illegally. In June 2011, a report from the Quality Assurance Agency found that the university had not run the necessary checks on institutes delivering courses it validated, and instructed it to review all of its validation arrangements. In October, the university announced that it would cease validating courses, just before news broke that one of its affiliated colleges in London was involved in a visa fraud. This led to calls from the vice chancellors of the universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, Glamorgan and Swansea for the University of Wales to be wound up. It was announced later in October that the University of Wales would be "effectively abolished", and merged into the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD), which itself merged with Swansea Metropolitan University on 1 August 2013. In August 2017 a deed of union was approved by the University of Wales and UWTSD, which integrated the two universities into a single functional body prior to a full legal constitutional merger; as of February 2020 this full merger has not been finalised. As part of the work towards merger, custody of the university's Gregynog Hall and its estate was transferred to the newly created Gregynog Trust in July 2019. Central services The administrative office of the University of Wales is located in Cardiff's Civic Centre. In addition to its work with the accredited institutions in Wales, the university also validates schemes of study at some 130 centres in the UK and across the world, though it is currently in the process of bringing this current validation model to a close. It runs a highly rated research centre, the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (incorporating the Welsh Dictionary Unit), which