Former president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), Mr Max Mosley, who died in 2021 at the age of 81, committed suicide due to the cancer he suffered.
During a court hearing in London, coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox said her investigation concluded that the case was a suicide by gunshot, which was a contributing factor to B-cell lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the immune system, from which Mr Mosley suffered.
Mr Mosley contacted his personal assistant the night before he was found dead to tell him about his decision to kill himself.
He could not be persuaded and had formed a “settled intent”, the court heard, and a suicide note was found the following day.
“I am completely convinced that Mr. Mosley would not have committed this act had he not discovered that he had painful and disabling terminal lymphoma,” Wilcox said.
Mr Mosley was diagnosed lymphoma cancer in 2019 and tried every treatment option but none had the desired effect.
He was the son of Wswald Mosley, founder in the 1930s of the British Union of Fascist party, which from the 1940s onwards was at the forefront of Nazi Germany supporters in the UK.
Mr Mosley led motorsport’s governing body the FIA from 1993 to 2009 and, in his role as FIA president, initiated widespread reforms of safety procedures in Formula 1 following the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994.
He earned more than 76,000 euros in June 2108 in compensation for moral damages from the now defunct British newspaper News of the World, which published the images and led the leader to campaign for stricter regulation of the press.
The UK court ruled that the sadomasochistic sex scenes published by the newspaper on its website did not have a Nazi character and that the public right to information did not justify recording the videos.
