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Flavio Briatore, banned from Formula One over the 'crashgate' affair, now faces questions over his role as co-owner of England's Queens Park Rangers Football Club, sponsored by Bahrain's national carrier, Gulf Air.
The Football League has requested details of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), motorsport's governing body, decision to ban the former team boss of Renault over his part in conspiring to fix the result of last year's Singapore Grand Prix.
Spokesman Nick Jones told GulfWeekly: "The Football League is aware of the situation and is currently investigating further."
The league requires every club owner to pass a 'fit and proper person' test and one of its rules says nobody can own a football club if they are banned from a sport's governing body.
The Football League chairman, Lord Mawhinney, has written to the FIA to request further details of its decision, another Football League spokesman added. "Thereafter, the League will consider its position on the matter."
Briatore is part-owner at Loftus Road with Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone and Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.
The sponsorship deal was controversially struck with Gulf Air's former CEO Bjorn Naf after a brief encounter with Briatore at the 2008 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix sparked off talks which led to the new sporting alliance between the kingdom, Gulf Air and Queens Park Rangers Football Club.
Gulf Air has kept quiet about the current controversy in the same manner it would not reveal specific financial aspects of the sponsorship deal although details were banded about the London press.
One newspaper's headline screamed: Rangers in £7m sponsorship deal. It reported that the contract was believed to be worth £1 million a season (BD598,700) and the overall value could rise to £7 million (BD4.2 million) depending on the club gaining promotion and staying in the Premier League.
The club has visited the kingdom once to stage coaching sessions with local children. A proposed match against the national side was cancelled.
It wasn't long before members of Bahrain's Parliament, critical of the way Mr Naf was running the loss-making national carrier, questioned the sponsorship deal suggesting that most people in Bahrain had never heard of the Championship side.
And, Mr Naf's fate took the same turn as many who attempted to manager QPR under Briatore. Jim Magilton is currently the seventh manager since he took over and Royal Jordanian Airline's former boss Samer Majali is now in the Gulf Air hot seat.
The flamboyant Italian is also chairman of the holding company that owns the club and a director on the board. He missed his side's 5-2 victory against Barnsley on Saturday which took QPR up to eighth place in the second tier of English football.
Briatore quit Renault ahead of last Monday's FIA hearing into Renault's ordering of Nelson Piquet junior to crash in Singapore to orchestrate a win for his teammate Fernando Alonso.
The FIA also handed a ban - suspended until the end of the 2011 season - to Renault.
Briatore has denied all the accusations against him over the affair, saying they were 'outrageous lies'.
A senior source at QPR said: "We haven't released any sort of statement and won't be at this stage. We are making no comment at all and have nothing to say."
Briatore was indefinitely banned from Formula One which was desperate to put the damaging Renault race-fixing scandal behind it at the weekend, but it was not easy with the sport returning to the scene of the incident in Singapore.
By a quirk of fate, the 14th race of the season took place in the city-state just days after Renault was slapped with a suspended two-year ban by the International Automobile Federation.
It was here at Formula One's inaugural night race last year that team principal Briatore and chief engineer Pat Symonds allegedly ordered Nelson Piquet junior to deliberately crash to help Alonso win.
Both Briatore and Symonds have been thrown out of the sport and Piquet's reputation is in ruins, but Alonso was cleared of any wrongdoing. Last year, Alonso began in 15th position, but after the Spaniard made an early pit stop to refuel, Piquet crashed into a wall, prompting the deployment of the safety car.
As Alonso's rivals then gradually disappeared into the pits to refuel, he catapulted himself into the lead and went on to win his first race in a year.
