Shortly after 6am on the morning of 21st February this year a Swedish businessman, Stefan Eriksson, crashed his car on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California. The car was a red Ferrari Enzo and the police, headed by Sheriff Sgt Phil Brooks, initially estimated that it was doing 162 mph when it crested a rise, became airborne, slewed sideways along an embankment and hit a telegraph pole so hard that it split the car in two. Later, following a police reconstruction of the accident, the speed was revised. Upwards. To 194mph. It emerged in reports that Eriksson's passenger, one Trevor Karney, was videotaping their high speed journey at the time and that the digital speedometer on the Ferrari Enzo was reading 199mph.

Although Eriksson and Karney miraculously emerged unscathed, other than for a cut lip suffered by Eriksson, they stumbled out of the wreckage and into a media spotlight that illuminated one of the biggest corporate collapses in UK business history. One that touched upon the world of Formula One and showed that, whatever the desire for sponsorship, endorsements or licensing agreements needed to fulfil the sport's unending quest for cash, it's always important to know who you are doing business with. It's called doing 'due diligence', establishing the credentials of the company you are doing business with, but in the case of Eriksson's company no one could have had any idea of the extent of the scandal that has now broken.

It was just before I quit my post as head of marketing at Jordan Grand Prix in June 2003 that the team was contacted by a company named Tiger Telematics which traded on the US stock exchange and was set to launch a revolutionary next-generation games console called Gametrac, a gaming device with built-in GPS positioning to enable parents to locate their children and communicate via SMS text messaging. Subsequently a sponsorship deal was agreed commencing at that year's British Grand Prix, running for the remainder of the season and then throughout 2004. For Jordan, a team moving into decline, new sponsorship deals were extremely important.

In December that year I took a call from Mike Hall-Taylor, who had taken over the running of marketing at Jordan after I left, asking me to introduce the boss of Gametrac, a Swede named Carl Freer, to Jenson Button. Freer was interested in buying Jenson's house in St George's Hill, Surrey, and as I was working with Jenson's management at the time Mike suggested I could make the necessary introductions.

I spoke to Freer on a couple of occasions and texted him back and forth. He was confident, highly articulate, apparently very credible and serious about buying Jenson's house. He even mentioned that perhaps Gametrac could sponsor Jenson. Later it would emerge that it was the charisma of the multi-lingual Freer that lay at the heart of Gametrac's success in wooing financial backers.

Fast forward a few months and the Gametrac-Jordan deal was dead, Freer telling me that Jordan had changed the on-car branding without telling him, and my former Jordan colleagues explaining that Gametrac had simply not paid up. In the midst of this I was invited to meet Freer at Tiger Telematics' impressive offices in Farnborough. He was interested in sponsoring Jaguar Racing and, showing me the various plans they had for Gametrac, we discussed options commencing with that year's Monaco Grand Prix. Nothing happened.