A bitter row between the Ferrari and McLaren Formula One teams over alleged espionage in Formula One came to London’s High Court on Tuesday.
Ferrari engineer Nigel Stepney was sacked after being accused of supplying McLaren’s chief designer, Mike Coughlan, with over 500 pages of secret Ferrari technical information in April.
At Tuesday’s preliminary hearing in a case relating to the intellectual property dimension of the row, Coughlan and his wife, Trudy, were ordered to pay costs following an early morning search of their home by officials last week.
Nigel Tozzi, the lawyer representing Ferrari, told Justice Michael Briggs that the Coughlans should not have had documents that were found during the search.
The defendants had ”behaved disgracefully”, he said, adding that Ferrari could have remained ”blissfully ignorant” of what had happened had it not been for a tip-off.
For the Coughlans, Martin Palmer argued that the defendants had behaved responsibly and any decision should be delayed pending further interim hearings.
The judge noted that Coughlan, who was in court, behaved in an ”entirely appropriate” manner when the search was conducted but ruled that payment should be made.
The case was adjourned until Wednesday amid a legal complication.
McLaren was not represented at the hearing.
Stepney, who denies any wrongdoing, is facing a criminal investigation under a separate process in Italy. — AFP
