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Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone may have pulled off Britain’s biggest ever tax dodge, Panorama will claim tonight.

A tax investigation that could have cost him more than £1billion was settled for £10million, the BBC1 programme reveals.

Ecclestone gave his Formula 1 assets to his then wife Slavica in 1996. They were later transferred to a family trust in Liechtenstein.

The arrangement is legally watertight, provided – as he has always claimed – Ecclestone was never connected with the trust. He has admitted in court proceedings to facing a tax bill of around $2billion – £1.2billion – if it were shown that he set it up.

After a nine-year investigation into the family’s tax affairs, HMRC offered to settle for a £10million payment from the family trusts in 2008.

Panorama understands that the trusts make that much from interest alone every six weeks.

Now Emily Thornberry MP, the Shadow Attorney General, has called for a new investigation by HMRC into Ecclestone’s affairs.

She said: “Ten million may sound like a lot, but you have to look at it in the round and if we’re talking about a trust fund in which they are making huge amounts of money like this, then it isn’t very much.”

Tax barrister Jolyon Maugham tells the programme this might be Britain’s biggest case of tax avoidance by an individual. “I’m certainly not aware of anything else remotely approaching that sort of magnitude,” he says.

Having gifted the assets to his wife, billionaire Ecclestone is banned from receiving any payments from his family’s offshore trusts. But one of the trust lawyers claims he has received about £60million a year from his wife following their divorce in 2009. The divorce money comes from the family trusts – the offshore wealth that escaped tax when he gave his fortune away.

Ecclestone declined to answer any of Panorama’s questions about his relationship with the family trusts. He said he paid almost £52million in tax last year.