In January, 2002, a 29-year-old woman was walking with her two young sons in Yokohama when a wheel detached itself from a passing truck, The wheel killed her and injured her children. The maker of the truck, Mitsubishi Motors, blamed the owner of the truck for faulty maintenance, but on 6th May Japanese police arrested seven former Mitsubishi executives.

What is this to do with Formula One? As we have often urged, it you want to follow Formula One, read the Business News. The story made only one paragraph in the UK, in the Daily Mail, but Mitsubishi's largest shareholder is DaimlerChrysler which holds 37 per-cent of the stock in Mitsubishi Motors and 65 per-cent of the stock in the Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corporation.

Mitsubishi Fuso is a wholly-owned subsidiary which was formed in 2003. After the fatal accident. In March this year, Mitsubishi admitted that there was a design fault in the wheel hubs of the trucks. It emerges that there have been at least 33 accidents involving wheels detaching from Mitsubishi trucks between 1992 and 2002, though some sources claim there were more than fifty such failures. It is alleged that the cover-up was to save the company from a recall, which would have both been expensive and would have involved a serious loss of face.

Mitsubishi Motors, which was responsible for the truck which shed its wheel, responded in the usual Japanese way. The chairman of Mitsubishi Fuso, Mr Michio Hori, called a press conference, issued a public apology, and blamed employees way down the line for the 'mistake'.

This strategy echoes that undertaken by Toyota in November, 2003, when it emerged that a Toyota employee had obtained questions for a national examination for motor mechanics. He had placed them in a 'training test' on a website aimed at Toyota dealerships in Japan, and had marked the 39 'real' questions with an asterisk.

This followed hard on the news that Toyota Motorsport has been raided by the German police because it was believed that designs originated by Ferrari had been illicitly transferred to Toyota Motorsport. That story, incidentally, has gone quiet though we are still on the case.

When we published the Toyota 'cheating in exams' story, we were contacted by someone who works in the Japanese automotive industry who told us that the public apology at a news conference was an everyday event in Japan. It always follows the same pattern: it always exonerates the company and its executives, and always places the blame on some poor sap down the pecking order.

Toyota Motorsport did this when found with Ferrari designs, yet our sources in Cologne named people within the team who knew that Toyota was using Ferrari plans and we recognised the names. We are not speaking of low-level employees.

In the case of Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Fuso, police have conducted three raids on factories, there have been seven arrests and, of course, there is a fatality involved. Press agencies and newspapers have run headlines which have included the phrase, Wheel Death Case. The word scandal also occurs.

A young mother leaves her house with her children and does not return. The truck driver must have been devastated, he had done nothing wrong, he was just an ordinary guy earning a wage. The owner of the truck has one of the world's largest corporations saying that he had been negligent, what does that do to someone? Put yourself in his position, Mitsubishi tells the world that your negligence killed an innocent mother and injured her children. At a guess, you would find your life's work in tatters. You have been building up your business, making a life for yourself and your family and you are branded an incompetent who kills people.

The current charges allege that the design fault, which Mitsubishi has admitted, was known even by the chairman of Mitsubishi Fuso, who retired on 26th April, 2004, though aged only 63. A police raid had already taken place and there were reports, ahead of the arrests, that arrests would be made.