This morning the FIA charged McLaren-Mercedes in the unfolding espionage scandal. The week's dramatic proceedings in the rapidly unfolding saga got underway when Ferrari arrived at the High Court in London and with the now-suspended McLaren-Mercedes Chief Designer Mike Coughlan set to reveal how he obtained the Scuderia's confidential documents.

Ferrari's lawyers were in the High Court on at the beginning of the week to outline their case against Coughlan, whose his wife Trudy has now been named as a co-defendant in the case. Two CDs, with a reported 780 pages of sensitive documents on them, were seized in a recent raid on Coughlan's English house. The chain of events implicating him, which wound up in the UK courts this week, were set off by a visit made by Trudy Coughlan to a photocopying shop near Woking recently and where an alert employee reportedly spotted the confidential nature of the documents and alerted Ferrari.

After hitting the High Court and the case being adjourned to allow Coughlan to supply an affidavit, the case was set to resume there on Wednesday. However negotiations between Ferrari's and Coughlan's lawyers resulted in a postponement before proceedings were set to resume. Now Coughlan is set to provide Ferrari's lawyers with a sworn affidavit detailing how, when and most importantly from who, he obtained the information in exchange for Ferrari dropping their case against him. Ferrari's communications chief, Luca Colajanni, said on Wednesday: "All we can tell you today is that there was an agreement on outstanding procedural matters and we will not be making the [Mike Coughlan] affidavit available to the Italian courts." Ferrari believe that its former employee Nigel Stepney has leaked the information.
 

As this was unfolding the sensational case - which has rocked the F1 world and generated daily newspaper headlines worldwide - took another turn twist as it was revealed that McLaren Managing Director Jonathan Neale reportedly knew that Coughlan had in his possession the Ferrari documents prior to the whole case blowing into the public domain. The McLaren team, which has strenuously denied that any 'intellectual property' leaked from Ferrari has been incorporated into its current MP4-22 F1 cars, allowed the FIA to inspect its cars, which it did so this week. However Ferrari and the FIA, who have been carrying out their own investigation, are both anxious to clarify when Neale was informed that Coughlan had this information.

This morning the case cranked up another huge gear as the FIA World Motorsports Council, meeting in Paris to examine its findings in the affair, charged McLaren-Mercedes with "breaching article 151c of the International Sporting Code" and to answer questions as to why the team "had unauthorised possession of documents and confidential information belonging to Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro."

The full statement issued by the FIA in Paris this morning read: "Representatives of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes have been requested to appear before an extraordinary meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council in Paris on Thursday, July 26, 2007. The team representatives have been called to answer a charge that between March and July 2007, in breach of Article 151c of the International Sporting Code, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes had unauthorised possession of documents and confidential information belonging to Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, including information that could be used to design, engineer, build, check, test, develop and/or run a 2007 Ferrari Formula One car," the statement concluded.