Bernie Ecclestone #
Introduction #
Bernie Ecclestone is the British billionaire who built Formula One into a global television juggernaut, running the sport as chief executive of the Formula One Group from 1987 to 2017 and earning the nickname “F1 Supremo” along the way. In September 2026, the 95-year-old magnate became a police matter again — this time in Portugal, where he was reportedly detained at Tires Aerodrome in Cascais, near Lisbon, after a routine inspection of his private jet allegedly turned up a shotgun in his luggage. Ecclestone has acknowledged the gun was his but says the whole thing was a paperwork mix-up for a clay-pigeon shooting trip, describing the ordeal to the Daily Mail as “wall-to-wall aggravation.”
Background Information #
Ecclestone was born on 28 October 1930 in Suffolk, England, left school at 16 to work in a gasworks laboratory, and made his fortune by seizing control of Formula One’s commercial rights, negotiating the television contracts that transformed the sport’s finances. He served as chief executive of the Formula One Group from 1987 until 2017, when he was replaced following the sport’s takeover by Liberty Media. He divides his time between Switzerland and Portugal, where he and his wife Fabiana Flosi own a home in Cascais — the same town as the aerodrome where he was detained — and he keeps a ski chalet in Saanen, Switzerland, the departure point of the flight in question. The September 2026 incident was not his first gun-related detention: he was arrested in Brazil in May 2022 after an undocumented LW Seecamp .32 pistol was found in his luggage during an X-ray screening as he boarded a private plane.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #
According to Portuguese outlet Correio da ManhĂŁ, Ecclestone was detained at Tires Aerodrome after officers from the Airport Division of Portugal’s Public Security Police conducted a routine inspection of his Dassault Falcon 7X, which had flown in from Switzerland, and discovered a shotgun. Ecclestone admitted to the Daily Mail that he traveled with the gun without the correct documentation: “I had a gun that I was bringing over from Switzerland to Portugal for clay-pigeon shooting. It’s as simple as that. I have guns at home there that are licensed.” He said he cleared customs without issue before a later police search of the bag, and that officers asked for the “blue book” — the permit paperwork he had not brought: “They said they would arrest me, but after what seemed like hours, we sorted it out, but it has been wall-to-wall aggravation.” The story grew murkier from there: while Portuguese media reported that the PSP made the arrest, a spokesman for the force told the Daily Mail, “Our border control officers haven’t made the arrest that’s being attributed to them,” with the force saying the matter instead involved the Tax and Customs Authority’s Lisbon delegation. Grandprix247 reported that Ecclestone was being held at the aerodrome while authorities determined next steps, and that it was not immediately clear whether he would be brought before a judge or formally charged and released.
Public Reaction and Consequences #
The image of the sport’s most powerful figure being held over a shotgun in his own jet drew immediate global coverage, from the New York Post to British and Formula One outlets, with the Brazil precedent — a 2022 arrest for an undocumented pistol — quoted in nearly every account. Ecclestone’s wife, Fabiana Flosi, traveled to Lisbon to try to resolve the matter, with Ecclestone saying she went “to surrender the gun, or pay the tax or whatever you need to bring it in, or to hand it over in the end.” He dismissed the seriousness of the episode in the same breath, telling the Daily Mail the bag “could have been [his six-year-old son] Ace’s fishing tackle for all it looked like, but it wasn’t,” and framing the incident as an annoyance rather than a legal reckoning. The 2022 Brazilian episode, which he once described as a “silly, tiny little incident,” ended with him paying bail and flying on to Switzerland, a precedent that made it easy for commentators to treat the Portugal detention as a repeating pattern rather than a one-off.
Current Status #
Ecclestone said the matter “can be put right” and that he was “sitting at home waiting for it to be the situation to be put to bed” — language suggesting the detention ended without him being charged, though no official charge or release document was reported in the immediate coverage. The police picture remained contradictory: Portuguese media attributed the arrest to the PSP, the PSP publicly denied making it, and the force pointed questions toward the Tax and Customs Authority, whose officials could not immediately be reached. It was not established in the reporting whether Ecclestone faces any charges in Portugal over the shotgun, and the presumption of innocence applies to any allegation arising from the incident. The episode also sits alongside his 2023 conviction in Britain for tax fraud, to which he pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court and received a 17-month prison sentence suspended for two years after agreeing to pay around ÂŁ653 million in back taxes and penalties.
Impact on Their Career/Life #
At 95, Ecclestone’s career as F1’s chief executive ended in 2017, so the detention cost him no active role — but it is now the second time in four years that the sport’s former supremo has been detained over a gun in his luggage, a fact that will forever follow the man who once ran the sport. His admission that he knowingly traveled without the weapon’s documentation, however casually he dismisses it, contrasts with his claim of innocence in the Brazil case and hands Portuguese authorities an unusually clear account from the man himself. The episode caps a run of legal entanglements — the suspended 2023 prison sentence for tax fraud, the 2022 Brazilian firearm arrest, and now the Portugal detention — that have replaced his reputation as sport’s master dealmaker with a late-life record of brushes with the law. Whatever the Customs Authority decides, the image of the 95-year-old billionaire held at a small aerodrome over a clay-pigeon shotgun is now part of the Ecclestone story, told everywhere from SĂŁo Paulo to Cascais.