Formula One chief executive Bernie Ecclestone will stand trial in Germany on charges of bribery and of aiding and abetting breach of trust, a court in Munich has said.
A statement released by the court on Thursday said the trial was likely to begin at the end of April.
F1 board chairman Peter Brabeck convened a hastily arranged meeting to discuss the implications of the court decision.
It is likely that Mr Ecclestone, 83, will stand down as a board director voluntarily but continue in his role as chief executive.
Mr Ecclestone was served with an indictment by Munich prosecutors last summer following the conviction on corruption charges of Gerhard Gribkowsky, a German banker, for accepting payments totalling $45m from Mr Ecclestone and Bambino, an Ecclestone family trust.
Mr Gribkowsky was BayernLB’s chief risk officer when the bank was a shareholder in F1. He facilitated the sale of the bank’s stake to CVC as part of the private equity group’s takeover of F1 in 2005-06.
Mr Gribkowsky was convicted on corruption charges relating to the $45m payments in 2012 and jailed for eight-and-a-half years.
The Munich court said the $45m payments, made between July 2006 and December 2007, were dressed in the form of consultancy contracts and that corporate structures were put in place to obscure the origin of the payments and their recipient.
In a statement, Mr Ecclestone’s lawyers said the decision to go to trial did not constitute a finding in the case itself.
“The accusations, which are based on statements by Mr Gribkowsky, are false and in view of the established facts don’t present a convincing picture,” the statement said.
They added that further witnesses had to be heard and new evidence assessed, some of which emerged in the seven-week civil case brought by German media group Constantin Medien against Mr Ecclestone in London at the end of last year.
Constantin alleges that Mr Ecclestone and Mr Gribkowsky conspired to undervalue F1 at the time of the 2005-06 sale. The judge in the case will give his ruling in due course.
Mr Ecclestone has already given evidence at the trial of Mr Gribkowsky and during the Constantin civil case. He has maintained that the payments were made to Mr Gribkowsky because the former banker was threatening to expose details about his tax arrangements.