PARIS, March 2: A British financier has been unveiled as the buyer of parts of the bankrupt French Formula One team Prost - a deal that could see a new team still involved in this year’s world championship.

Charles Nickerson’s Phoenix Finance Ltd was named as the company behind the deal which has seen parts of the French team bought and which could see a new outfit competing as soon as the second race of the new Formula One season in Malaysia on March 17.

The identity of the group was revealed by the law firm that acted on behalf of the Prost team which went bust with huge debts earlier this year.

The Versailles commercial court ordered the company ceded to Charles J. Nickerson and Phoenix Finance Ltd in partnership with the TWR Group, managed by Tom Walkinshaw, certain parts of the Formula One Prost Grand Prix team, international law firm Leboeuf, Lamb, Greene and MacRae said in a statement.

The fee involved was reportedly 2.5-million euros and includes cars, technology and development patents and above all the right to sign up for this year’s world championship.

The purchase does not include the Prost headquarters at Guyancourt on the outskirts of Paris or any of the 200 staff employed by the former four-time world champion.

Earlier Friday, a bitter row broke out over the purchase between Arrows chief Tom Walkinshaw and Paul Stoddart, the head of the Minardi team.

Walkinshaw, in Melbourne for the season-opening Formula One Grand Prix on Sunday, confirmed he was supporting the engineering side of the takeover.

Walkinshaw said a Paris court responsible for winding up the bankrupt French team run by former champion Alain Prost had accepted an offer just before a February 28 deadline.

The announcement infuriated Minardi’s Australian team owner Paul Stoddart, who described the move as “an absolute travesty of justice” and said he would fight through the courts to have the decision reversed.

Minardi said they put in an offer to buy out Prost.

TWR (Tom Walkinshaw Racing) is supporting a group of people who have bought the assets of Prost, Walkinshaw said.

TWR will help them with engineering to get it up and running. Obviously the season is here and they need help to do it so that’s what we’re doing to support them.

We aim to make it happen definitely by Brazil (GP on March 31), maybe by Malaysia (March 17), I don’t know.

But Stoddart didn’t hold back during a scheduled press conference after Friday’s first official practice for this weekend’s Melbourne race.

I think what Tom Walkinshaw has done, and I’ve had five legal opinions, three in the UK and two in France to say what he has done is outside the governing document of Formula One, the Concorde Agreement, Stoddart said.

As far as I am concerned, liquidation is virtue of its word, it’s the final state, and there’s only one way you can pull something out of liquidation under any law and that is to simply pay all the creditors.

Stoddart alleged that between US$30 and 60 million was offered for the Prost team some weeks ago, but the offers were rejected.

We now have an offer that is less than 10 per cent of the lowest of those offers that seems to have been accepted, he said.—AFP