Ineos ‘imprison Ainslie and colleagues with chains and padlocks’
The filing also includes an allegation of “false imprisonment”, in January last year, immediately after their split, when Ainslie and his Athena colleagues allegedly found themselves locked inside their own Northamptonshire offices by an Ineos employee and two security contractors who turned up at the premises.
Shortly after the termination of the agreement with Ineos on Jan 17, 2025, Athena allege that an Ineos employee, Raymond Fellows, turned up at their Turweston site in Northamptonshire with a security contractor and demanded that the staff present hand over all assets and leave the premises. They declined. It is also claimed that the visitors demanded to search staff members’ bags as they left the premises at the end of the day, which was also rejected.
Fellows then allegedly turned up the next day with two security contractors and requested the keys for the site from the building’s landlord. This was also denied. “Shortly thereafter, and in circumstances where the site was routinely locked from the inside, Mr Fellows and his associates proceeded to chain and padlock the doors to the Defendant’s site from the outside, and affixed ‘No Entry’ signs. In so doing, Mr Fellows and his associates, at all times acting on behalf of the Claimant, imprisoned the Defendant’s employees in the site without any lawful authority. In the premises, the Claimant committed the tort of false imprisonment.”
Ainslie and Matt Robinson, his CFO, allegedly managed to exit via a fire escape and persuade them to “remove chains and padlocks”, by telling them they were “intimidating the Defendant’s members of staff and causing health and safety risks”.
Ainslie says this act “was conducted without any contractual or other lawful basis”.
Toto Wolff’s Mercedes dragged into legal row
Athena’s former technical partners, Mercedes F1 – in which Ineos owns a one-third stake – have also been dragged into the row, with Ainslie accusing Toto Wolff’s team of a “breach of contract”, albeit they infer this was at the behest of Ineos.
Athena claim both Ineos and Mercedes F1 breached a non-compete clause by announcing a bid to challenge for the 38th America’s Cup (AC38) in Naples next year following Ineos’s split with Athena. That challenge has since been shelved. They cite Clause 4.2.5(ii) of their agreement, which states that if Ineos chose not to continue with Athena, “it undertook not to enter a team in any subsequent America’s Cup campaign or appoint any other third party to run or operate a team in any subsequent America’s Cup campaign”.
Athena also claims Mercedes F1 locked them out of their own Office365 IT system for five months, denying them access to emails and data, and “misappropriating and using the Defendant’s passwords to transfer several domain names”. “MercedesF1 did not restore the Defendant’s access to its IT facilities until July 2025, following significant correspondence and the threat of injunctive relief by the Defendant,” Athena claimed in their filing.