» Flavio sells out to Bernie!

Disgraced former Renault F1 boss Flavio Briatore has given F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone an early Christmas present, or is it the other way around?

It turns out that Bernie has bought Flavio’s shareholding in the London-based Queens Park Rangers football club, leaving the 80-year-old billionaire with a 60% “majority” ownership of the Premier League club.

It had earlier been rumoured that both men were keen to offload their shareholding to Force India boss Vijay Mallya, but it would seem that Bernie (at least) has had a change of heart.

It is still believed, however, that Briatore – who was once rumoured to have declared his passion for QPR so strongly that he walked the QPR headquarters wearing slipper embroidered with the team’s coat of arms – owns a nominal shareholding in the team.

Briatore’s ownership of the team came under a cloud in the wake of his being found guilty and banned (a ruling later overturned) after the ‘Crashgate’ scandal, with suggestions that he would fall foul of the Football Association’s ‘fit and proper persons test’ written into its ownership rules.