{"id":18310,"date":"2013-05-20T07:35:04","date_gmt":"2013-05-20T11:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=18310"},"modified":"2013-05-20T07:35:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-20T11:35:04","slug":"f1-owner-cvc-votes-to-keep-ecclestone-despite-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/f1-owner-cvc-votes-to-keep-ecclestone-despite-charges\/","title":{"rendered":"F1 owner CVC votes to keep Ecclestone despite charges"},"content":{"rendered":"

F1’s owners have voted to keep Bernie Ecclestone at the helm of the sport, despite reports German prosecutors have decided to charge him with bribery.<\/p>\n

\"Bernie-Ecclestone-1\"The bribery case surrounds a payment of $44 million to now-jailed German banker Gerhard Gribkowsky some years ago, and suspicions the 82-year-old Briton wanted CVC to buy the sport’s commercial rights because he would be retained as chief executive.<\/p>\n

Ecclestone, however, argues that Gribkowsky simply blackmailed him, threatening to reveal potentially costly secrets about his tax affairs.<\/p>\n

And he told the Sunday Times newspaper that, at the end of last week in Geneva, CVC chiefs met to discuss the ramifications of the German charges.<\/p>\n

“Everyone voted to support me staying on and running the business,” said Ecclestone.<\/p>\n

“The board agrees I should stay unless I’m convicted.”<\/p>\n

He dismissed the German charges as “a complete load of rubbish”.<\/p>\n

Ecclestone, however, told F1 business journalist Christian Sylt that, despite not actually receiving the charge sheet yet, he does expect the German prosecutors to proceed.<\/p>\n

“I hope they don’t but I think they will,” he said in the Guardian.\u00a0 “Then we will see what happens.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean to say there will be a trial.”<\/p>\n

Indeed, Reuters news agency reported several days ago that prosecutors could settle the case with Ecclestone in exchange for a “non-penal payment”.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

F1’s owners have voted to keep Bernie Ecclestone at the helm of the sport, despite reports German prosecutors have decided to charge him with bribery. The bribery case surrounds a payment of $44 million to now-jailed German banker Gerhard Gribkowsky some years ago, and suspicions the 82-year-old Briton wanted CVC to buy the sport’s commercial …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[2120,3],"tags":[59,2625,5262,5340,2638],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18311,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18310\/revisions\/18311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}