Richards 'concerned' about proposed FIA changes

David Richards says the FIA needs to "reflect the highest standard"

David Richards, the chairman of MotorsportUK, has urged Formula 1's governing body to rethink changes that would limit the ways its leadership could be held to account.

BBC Sport revealed this week that the FIA is planning a set of revisions to the statutes that would restrict the powers of the audit and ethics committees.

Richards, whose role at MotorsportUK gives him a voting power at the FIA, told BBC Sport he was "concerned that major organisations around the world would refuse to work with the FIA if it did not reflect the highest standards of corporate governance, as befits our sport".

He added to The Race website: "Hopefully people will realise that this is not the right direction to take, and that we need to make sure that the FIA upholds the very best of sporting governance in the world.

"I'm hopeful that that will be the case. I'm hopeful that it's just an oversight, and people have not fully understood the consequences of this, and we can correct it before it changes."

The changes would ensure that any ethics complaints were overseen by the FIA president and president of its senate, rather than the senate itself.

And they would remove the power of the audit committee to investigate financial issues independently.

They are being proposed by FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem at the end of a year in which the audit and ethics committees have investigated a number of allegations about the Emirati.

These included questions about the finances of Ben Sulayem's private office; the establishment of a $1.5m "president's fund" to pay member clubs, which vote for the FIA president. Neither of these were progressed. And two separate allegations that Ben Sulayem interfered in the operations of grands prix in 2023, which were dismissed.

Richards said: "The audit committee, in my view, should be completely independent and be able to investigate any issue it wishes within the FIA.

"The statute change that's being proposed will stop that, and that's not good governance.

"Hopefully people will realise that this is not the right direction to take, and that we need to make sure that the FIA upholds the very best of sporting governance in the world."

The FIA declined to comment.

The proposals will be voted on by the FIA General Assembly of member clubs on 13 December.

Among other changes they:

Replace the ability of the ethics committee to "investigate and assess" complaints with a power only to "carry out an initial assessment to determine whether an in-depth investigation is necessary".

This report would then be submitted to the president of the senate, "who may decide to take further action".

This essentially gives the power to investigate ethics issues to the president of the senate and removes it from the ethics committee.

The changes also insert clauses that say that if the FIA president is the subject of an investigation by the ethics committee, the report is submitted to the president of the senate; and if the president of the senate is investigated, the report goes to the FIA president.

This essentially means the FIA president and the president of the senate would decide each other's fate in any ethics inquiry.

The president of the senate, Carmelo Sanz De Barros, is a member of Ben Sulayem's four-person leadership team.