Soccer: F1 cheat Briatore faces QPR kick-out

The Football League will today seek a legally watertight way of disqualifying Flavio Briatore, the owner of Queen's Park Rangers, from the board of the club.

Lord Mawhinney, who will chair the meeting which will consider the Briatore case and also decide whether the owners of Notts County and Leeds United meet the League's "fit and proper person" test, knows that the first of these provides the most searching examination of ownership rules to date.

The test bars individuals who are the subject of a ban "from involvement in the administration of a sport by a sports governing body or such other similar forms of disqualification as may operate from time to time."

The latter of the two appears to provide Briatore with no get-out, with the World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) having refused to recognise any teams or drivers engaging him in "any capacity".

The best course open to Briatore and his lawyers, who have tabled their case in his defence, would appear to be an argument that he should not be banned ahead of the outcome of any appeal into the WMSC's ruling.

Mawhinney, the Football League chairman, knows the significance of the case at a time when profound questions are being asked of both the Premier League and Football League "fit and proper person" regimes.

"We need to have legal clarity if somebody is in difficulty with a different sporting organisation as to exactly what the nature of that difficulty is before we try to apply our regulation," he said yesterday.

"This is complex and complicated. I have taken legal counsel's advice, we will be going into the meeting with the benefit of that advice. It isn't simple, and it isn't straightforward. But I've been around a bit, I have quite good hearing, I understand what's being said and we will reflect that as a board."

Leading sports lawyer Adam Morallee, whose specialisms include governance, said: "The question at issue will be whether the [WMSC] ban is a permanent ban or one subject to appeal."

The League's decision carries huge significance for QPR. Though Briatore brought Formula One rights holder Bernie Ecclestone and steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal on board at Loftus Road, he is the one seen regularly at the club. A disqualification for the flamboyant Italian could see all three of them seeking a way out and QPR being put up for sale.

It will be a day of major significance for the issue of football club ownership in general. The decision for the League in the Notts County case is whether the club's new owners, the investors in the Qadbak investment fund, registered in the tax-haven of the British Virgin Islands and of which little is yet known, may pass the same test.

The Leeds case relates to chairman Ken Bates' acknowledgement of his mistake in saying he jointly owned the club's holding company, the Forward Sports Fund.

In fact, Forward, registered in the tax-haven of the Cayman Islands, has 10,000 shares, whose owners are yet to be ascertained. Mawhinney said of the latter case: "The law of the land allows money to be 'hidden' offshore for tax purposes. Personally, I do not believe that owners' identities should also be hidden from the League, as the representative of fans, if their clubs want to play in our League. But as everyone in the League recognises this tradition will not be easy to change."

The League's decision comes amid questions over the identity of the newest Premier League owner and his financial viability: Ali al-Faraj, who became proprietor of Portsmouth this week. It is understood that the Premier League adjudged him "fit and proper" six weeks ago -shortly before he was beaten to the ownership of the club by Sulaiman al-Fahim, who was also adjudged "fit and proper" though his investment in the club never materialised.

The Premier League is comfortable with the decision on Faraj and consider the absence of published information on him to be a reflection of the private nature of business in Saudi Arabia.

Pompey insist that Faraj is the individual to drive the club on. Further inquiries by The Independent in the Middle East yesterday were unable to establish whether he is a source of money, or actually a front man for another investor.

One deal-maker, who has been involved in discussions with the Football League over a prospective move to bring an investor to a major club, said yesterday that neither it nor the Premier League had the resources to submit prospective owners to a due diligence process so as to make the fit and proper person test a rigorous one.

"It's a fallacy that it's called a test," he said. "It's a form you fill in and essentially you self-certify. The form doesn't get 'approved' as such but no one ever generally fails. If it transpires that you have a murky past, then they are down on you like a ton of bricks."

- THE INDEPENDENT

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