Nov.13 (GMM) Flavio Briatore claims his lifetime ban from motor racing was the result of "secret negotiations" rather than the democratic outcome of a World Motor Sport Council vote.
In the September hearing into the so-called 'crash-gate' race-fixing scandal, the former Renault boss was banned for life while the French team emerged effectively unscathed.Shortly afterwards, one Council voter - UAE club president Mohammed Ben Sulayem - told a local newspaper that "we did our negotiations before and everybody is happy with the result".He added that F1 is "a big show and it needs teams (and) in the current crisis, you cannot go around hitting people and causing severe damage".In a statement referred to on Friday by the news agency AP, Briatore said his penalty was "the result of secret negotiations on the eve of the so called hearing ... in front of the World Motor Sport Council, behind which the FIA is now trying to hide".After other legal documents were leaked this week ahead of Briatore's November 24 appeal in Paris' Tribunal de Grande Instance, the FIA insisted that the decision to ban the 57-year-old Italian "was made by an overwhelming majority of the attending World Motor Sport Council members".
