The head of Austria’s motorsport federation says he is “saddened” by proposed changes that will reduce accountability at motorsport’s governing body the FIA.
Oliver Schmerold, the chief executive officer of the OAMTC, says the new statutes would be “not good governance” and “not good in terms of checks and balances”.
Schmerold said he had communicated his concerns to the president of the FIA, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, but it is his “sad projection” that the changes will be approved by member clubs on Friday.
The changes to the FIA statutes will be put to the vote at a meeting of the general assembly in Kigali, Rwanda.
Schmerold said the likely consequences for the FIA would be that “we lose a certain level of checks and balances [and] we might be questioned by other international bodies about our governance and we could run the risk that things go wrong”.
He said the changes, which limit the independence of the FIA’s audit and ethics committees, would make it harder to recruit “established and independent individuals” to them.
“The ethics and audit committees would lose that attractiveness so there would be maybe in future only individuals on those committees who are more or less in one way or another depending on the actual leadership,” Schmerold said.
“Which individual who is behind good governance and who has shown he has a good professional track record would be ready to take on a position on a committee which is completely controlled by two individuals?”
The changes in question would ensure 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.
Schmerold is the second senior figure from an FIA member club to express concerns about the proposed changes after David Richards, the chairman of MotorsportUK, said on Saturday they “did not reflect the highest standards of corporate governance”.
The changes have been proposed at the end of a year in which the ethics and audit committees have investigated a number of allegations about the conduct of Ben Sulayem.
Another controversial change emerges
Schmerold added that this was the second time in six months that he had expressed concerns about planned changes to the statutes that appear to affect accountability and governance.
The previous time, at the last general assembly in Samarkand in Uzbekistan in June, was over a statute that has come to be known as the “urgency” rule.
This grants the FIA president the power to impose changes through a group made up of the president of the FIA senate and one member of his choosing from each of the two world councils, for motorsport and mobility, “in particular when circumstances do not permit a meeting of the senate, especially in the event of urgent and/or critical situations”.
Any decision made by this group would need only to be “communicated” to the senate rather than approved by it.
The senate, the FIA’s supervisory body, is made up of 16 members.
Schmerold said the clause was “far too openly formulated” and “means the president can decide at his own discretion what topic he could decide upon only with the president of the senate and two selected members of the two world councils, who he can select”.
He added: “I was the only one who stood up in the general assembly in Samarkand and asked for a removal of those topics from the agenda and not to vote on them but give it more thought and rework it. And this was unfortunately not taken forward by the chairman.”
What does the FIA say?
The FIA has so far refused to comment on the reasoning behind the new statutes.
BBC Sport has asked for comment specifically on Schmerold’s accusations but has received no response.
Schmerold said that Ben Sulayem and head of legal affairs Paul O’Dowd had responded to his objections when he raised them on Tuesday.
He said: “The answer of the president and the head of legal was that in order to protect the [identity of] individuals who might be subject to investigation from being published to a broader audience it needed to be kept to a very close group.
“Their argument goes that not to share reports of the ethics committee with the full senate protects the individuals from being displayed to a broader public. Whoever might be subject of an investigation.”
Schmerold said he did not agree with this line of argument.
“If we cannot rely on the integrity of a senate member then we have another issue,” he said.
“The senate consists of 16 individuals who see the report. We must have the trust that they will deal with the subject in an appropriate way. I would rather have it with 16 people, the majority of whom are really independent, than a close group of only two who are not independent from each other.”
Schmerold added that a proposed new statute that dictates that, in the event either the FIA president or the president of the senate is investigated, the other receives the report, was also a concern because the two men are allies.
The president of the senate, Carmelo Sanz De Barros, is a member of Ben Sulayem’s four-person leadership team.
Schmerold said: “There is a strong link between the individuals and if only the two of them are responsible for the control, it’s not independent any more.”
He said he was also concerned by a new practice adopted by the FIA leadership in tabling proposals.
“This time, as with the proposal in June this year, the world councils were only asked to vote by e-vote, without a meeting, without a discussion, and in parallel to the e-vote of the world council the documents were already sent out to all the members in the general assembly,” he said.
Schmerold is not attending the general assembly in person in order “to show our distance to the current developments” and said the Austrian federation would vote remotely.
