Why Bernie Ecclestone being forced to pay £653 million to the taxman could be a VICTORY for the wheeler-dealer as he avoids jail
People have often joked about Bernie Ecclestone being the same height as his statuesque wives… provided he’s standing on his wallet. But this morning, that well-worn punchline no longer rings quite true.
The Napoleon-sized motor-racing tycoon must now begin life as a convicted criminal by handing over £652,634,836 to HMRC, in addition to paying prosecution costs of £74,000 and settling his own legal bills, which are likely to run to six figures.
It’s enough to leave a significant dent in anyone’s fortune, even a self-made cash pile that has elevated Ecclestone to 73rd in the league tables of Britain’s richest men, worth an estimated £2.498 billion.
For a man who hates wasting money — and is famed for serving sandwiches and Hula Hoops, rather than caviar and champagne, on his private jet — writing these gargantuan cheques will come as a blow.
Yet by suddenly pleading guilty to a fraud that involved lying to tax authorities about the existence of a Singapore-based trust worth £400 million, the 92-year-old has in fact engineered a significant coup. For one thing, he’s avoided having to spend the remainder of his life behind bars, instead being given a suspended sentence of 17 months.
Bernie Ecclestone must now begin life as a convicted criminal by handing over £652,634,836 to HMRC, in addition to paying prosecution costs of £74,000 and settling his own legal bills, which are likely to run to six figures. Pictured: Petra Stunt, Bernie Ecclestone and Tamara Ecclestone in June 2017
Baby driver: With third wife Fabiana and their son Ace
Ecclestone pictured with driver Niki Lauda in Monaco in 1979
For another, Ecclestone has side-stepped a lengthy and no doubt stressful trial that would have exposed the inner workings of his family’s byzantine financial empire to scrutiny.
Little wonder, then, that old chums on the Formula One circuit, who have marvelled for decades at his deal-making, were yesterday describing the events that unfolded at Southwark Crown Court as ‘classic Bernie’.
‘This is typical of the way he’s lived his life,’ said one. ‘The wheeler-dealer has decided to cut a deal. This outcome stops him ending up behind bars and, more importantly, given his age, means his affairs will be more or less in order so he no longer has to worry about leaving behind any sort of unresolved mess for his kids to deal with. He was in a nasty spot, so he’ll regard it as a win.’
Ecclestone, who adjourned after sentencing to London’s Borough Market with third wife Fabiana, has declined to comment on the outcome of the case, telling a passing journalist that ‘bloody lawyers’ had told him not to talk publicly.
However, friends said that his decision to plead guilty was taken at the very last moment. ‘Bernie once played cards with Lord Lucan, and in this case he was a shrewd enough operator to realise that he’d ended up in a poker game where he held a terrible hand, and needed to escape without losing everything.’
In 2014, he paid £60 million to stop a bribery trial in Germany that could have seen him locked up for ten years. That case involved a payment of £27 million he’d previously made to German banker Gerhard Gribkowsky. Prosecutors claimed the cash was a bung designed to fix a deal involving the sale of Formula One shares, but Ecclestone claimed that he was actually being blackmailed by Gribkowsky, who had allegedly threatened to give HMRC some potentially damaging information about his finances.
These murky court cases have bookended a topsy-turvy few years for the Godfather of Formula One. In 2017, he finally lost control of the sport, which he’d presided over from a blacked-out motorhome known as ‘The Kremlin’ since the early 1970s.
As his business activities have started to wind down, he has seen his colourful domestic life decorate the gossip pages, thanks not only to his Instagram-star daughters Tamara, 39, and Petra, 34, but the arrival of his fourth child, Ace, born in July 2020, when Bernie was 89.
By suddenly pleading guilty to a fraud that involved lying to tax authorities about the existence of a Singapore-based trust worth £400 million, the 92-year-old has in fact engineered a significant coup. Pictured: Ecclestone arrives for a fraud case hearing at Southwark Crown Court in London on Thursday
He has also found himself at the centre of a string of public controversies, sparked largely by a habit of making highly-provocative comments during interviews. Last year, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he told Good Morning Britain that he regarded Vladimir Putin as a friend, saying ‘I’d still take a bullet for him.’ Later in the interview, delivered shortly after the mass rape and execution of civilians at the city of Bucha had come to light, Ecclestone said that ‘everybody makes mistakes from time to time’. He later apologised. Another occasion, shortly after Ace’s birth, saw the tycoon — who once joked that ‘women should be all dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances’ — accused of misogyny for telling This Morning host Richard Madeley that he refused to change nappies because ‘that’s what wives are for’.
On a more serious note, Ecclestone a few years earlier decided to laud Adolf Hitler’s ability to ‘command a lot of people able to get things done’.When critics pointed out things Hitler ‘got done’ included the murder of six million Jews, Ecclestone clarified that he’d only really meant to refer to Hitler’s pre-Holocaust career, up to around 1938. After that, he conceded ‘the guy was obviously a lunatic’. Again, he later apologised.
In a follow-up interview he accused Jews of failing to solve the banking crisis even though ‘they have a lot of influence everywhere’. It was then revealed that, among his priceless collection of 82 vintage sports cars was a Lancia Astura limousine in which Hitler and Mussolini had driven through Rome in 1939 to sign the ‘Pact of Steel’.
Elsewhere, a racism controversy reared its head during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, when Ecclestone told CNN that ‘a lot of black people are more racist than white people’. Attempting to repair the damage, he told The Mail on Sunday he couldn’t possibly be a real racist because he’d once employed a black chauffeur.
A sympathetic way to view these controversies is that Ecclestone’s sharp-elbowed business career had made him a great admirer of dictators. ‘I am not a supporter of democracy,’ Ecclestone once said. ‘You need a dictator. As a dictator, you say, ‘This is what I am going to do.’ In a democracy, it gets watered down.’ It’s a worldview he certainly liked to apply to his stewardship of Formula One, which has grown rich off the back of some of the world’s most oppressive regimes.
With his late business partner Max Mosley, the racist son of fascist leader Oswald, Ecclestone staged major events in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China and a host of other countries allergic to human rights. For years, the duo even chose to take their business to apartheid South Africa, only pulling out in 1985 when broadcasters threatened to cancel TV deals.
His single-minded pursuit of cash is perhaps a product of his tough upbringing. The son of Sidney, a trawlerman from Suffolk who moved to wartime Dartford to become a crane operator, Ecclestone’s family was so poor that he didn’t have a birthday cake until he was eight.
After leaving school at 15, he began selling second-hand motorbikes from a local car dealership.
‘He’s 5 ft 3 in tall, working class, no formal education after the age of 15, with one working eye,’ is how Manish Pandey, director of a documentary about Ecclestone, described him. ‘There is nothing ostensibly going for him except he is insanely bright.’
Ecclestone avoided having to spend the remainder of his life behind bars, instead being given a suspended sentence of 17 months. He is pictured with his third wife Fabiana
As his business activities have started to wind down, he has seen his colourful domestic life decorate the gossip pages, thanks not only to his Instagram-star daughters Tamara, 39, and Petra, 34, but the arrival of his fourth child, Ace, born in July 2020, when Bernie was 89. Pictured: Bernie and Fabiana Ecclestone
The car dealership, which coincided with the post-war boom in private transport, was so successful that in 1951 it became Compton & Ecclestone. And by the late 1950s, he had become sufficiently wealthy to dabble in motorsport, first as a (largely unsuccessful) driver and then as manager to various drivers. His entry into Formula One came in 1971, when Ecclestone was asked to help manage the Brabham Team, and the following year, he bought it outright, for £100,000.
Back then, it was a gentleman’s sport. But Ecclestone believed it could be big business and used a seat on the board of F1’s Constructors’ Association to somehow acquire its global broadcasting rights.
As TV ownership soared, he then began to sell the sport overseas, eventually cutting deals in more than 100 countries. By the early 1990s, the sport was valued at £2.5 billion and Ecclestone was making £1 million a week. When F1 was eventually prised from his control, by Liberty Media in 2017, the whole thing sold for around £6.4 billion.
There were choppy moments along the way. In 1997, he was at the centre of a political storm when it emerged that he’d given £1 million to Tony Blair’s Labour Party, which then tried to spare Formula One from a ban on tobacco sponsorship. Blair had to apologise and return the donation, but Ecclestone did not seem to mind if it looked like a bribe: ‘I don’t care what people thought,’ he said afterwards.
Around the same time, his assets were transferred to a family trust in Switzerland. Though he maintained a base in London for years, Ecclestone now largely divides his time between the tax haven mountain resort of Gstaad and Ibiza, where he keeps a large villa.
His first marriage was to Ivy, a telephone operator, in 1952, with whom he had a daughter, Deborah. In the mid-1960s, he walked out on Ivy after falling for a Singaporean named Tuana Tan.
But their 17-year relationship ended one day in 1982 when he met a 6 ft 2 in model named Slavica in the pits at the Monza Grand Prix. She was 23 and he was 51. Famously, Slavica’s first words to him were: ‘If you come any nearer, I’ll kick you.’
It would be a fiery marriage. At the height of their relationship, which produced daughters Petra and Tamara, he fixed a sign on their kitchen door: ‘Never mind about the dog, beware of the wife.’
They divorced in 2009. Three years later, he married Brazilian lawyer Fabiana Flosi.
Neither Petra nor Tamara attended their father’s third wedding and Tamara didn’t even send a gift, saying: ‘He’s usually such a rational person and this seems like such an irrational thing to do.’
Ecclestone was said to be angry that his daughters appeared to be frittering away their inheritance.
Petra had spent £12 million on her 2010 wedding to self-styled businessman James Stunt. She wore an £80,000 Vera Wang dress to the ceremony and hired Eric Clapton and the Black Eyed Peas to entertain guests.
In an interview, Bernie joked: ‘I had to do something at the time that upset me. I had to give her away. I’d rather have sold her.’
Ecclestone has also found himself at the centre of a string of public controversies, sparked largely by a habit of making highly-provocative comments during interviews. He is pictured with his third wife Fabiana
Tamara, for her part, stumped up £45million on a London mansion, which boasted a conveyer rack to carry her £700,000 shoe collection. She then flaunted her luxury lifestyle on Channel 5 reality show, Billion $ Girl. After a few years, however, bridges were mended.
Bernie was at Petra’s side during her hugely acrimonious divorce from Stunt, who at one point called Ecclestone a ‘melon-sized dwarf’ (to which Bernie responded ‘fair enough, I’m a little shorter than average’) and both daughters are said to be fond of their new half-brother. In person, the once-abrasive businessman — feared for his combative manner — has now mellowed considerably.
One acquaintance describes him as ‘surprisingly charming and not in the least bit oily’ and says that ‘behind the façade, he’s got a rather brilliant sense of humour’.
He responded to an interviewer’s query about when he might consider publishing an autobiography by saying: ‘The morning after I die. And the first 12 copies will go to the Inland Revenue.’
Whether Bernie would still take that line, after yesterday’s expensive visit to court, is of course anyone’s guess.
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