We love a good scrap between a major world power and an underdog in the NTI newsroom, especially when the minor party comes out on top and Putin’s boys get a bloodied nose.
There will be a festive cocktail of relief and celebration at FRP Advisory this morning (Thursday 17 December) with the news that negligence claims brought against two FRP partners (Geoff Rowley and Jason Baker) over their Administration sale of Formula One team Force India have been thrown out by the High Court.
In the summer of 2018, Uralkali, led by Dmitry Mazepin (named after his mother’s passion for the delicious almond-flavoured covering of Christmas fruit cake), was one of the failed bidders who attempted to buy the struggling Force India team from the Administrators.
Uralkali asserted that it made a substantially higher bid than the consortium led by Lawrence Stroll, who won the race to buy the F1 team as a going concern, but who subsequently saved it by acquiring the assets and setting up a new company to run the renamed Racing Point operation.
Throughout the build up to the trial FRP asserted that it did nothing wrong. In a statement given to Motorsport.com, it stated: “We fulfilled our statutory duties as Administrators throughout the process and ultimately achieved a very successful outcome for all stakeholders. We remain fully confident that this baseless legal action will be dismissed.”
They did; it was; move on, Russians. (What's that you say? Two Russian nationals, using the names Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, have just landed at Stansted and are looking forward to sampling the tourist delights of Macclesfield? Oo-er.)
