NIGEL STEPNEY, the Ferrari engineer accused of sabotaging his own team, yesterday indicated he will sue his former employers for unfair dismissal and claimed that he had been hounded from his home in Italy after being constantly shadowed by men he did not recognise.

Speaking from a Mediterranean hideaway, he also indicated that he continued to believe he had been made a scapegoat and was prepared to reveal the secrets of his time at the team. “I’ve been framed,” he said. “I’ve been with Ferrari for 14 years and there’s been a lot of controversy over the years, and I obviously know where the bodies are buried.”

He added that he and his fiancée Ash and their baby daughter had fled from their home after being followed when out in their car by men who would not reveal their identity. “They aren’t journalists, and when we’ve cornered them they’ve refused to speak, and they have tracking equipment on my car,” he said. “They have made it impossible for me to stay in Italy.”

Stepney is being investigated by Italian police over claims that he had attempted to sabotage the Ferrari cars of Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa before the Monaco Grand Prix in May. The engineer’s house in Italy has been searched twice.

He insisted yesterday that he had not been involved in any sabotage, nor any theft of documents from Ferrari. “I had been in the area of the factory where the so-called incident took place, as it is somewhere I had access to, but it is not true I did anything,” he said.

His lawyer, Sonia Bartolini, said last night: “We are going to fight this and it is to be expected that we will challenge Ferrari’s actions in dismissing Nigel. This cannot be left as it is.”

Ferrari were unavailable for comment.

Last week the espionage scandal surrounding the sport deepened when it emerged that Mike Coughlan, the McLaren chief designer, had been suspended over allegations that he was in possession of nearly 500 pages of Ferrari documents.

Stepney yesterday denied that he had passed any documents to Coughlan. “I have no idea how he got them, no idea at all,” he said. “We met at the end of April in Spain, just a catchup between old friends.” He added that that meeting had been witnessed by Mike Gascoigne, the Spyker technical director.

On Friday it was revealed that both Stepney and Coughlan had met Nick Fry, the team principal of Honda, at a Heathrow hotel on June 1. Stepney backed up Fry’s statement that it was simply a meeting about the men joining the Japanese-backed team. “I went to Honda to discuss employment. At no time did I offer, and nor did Mike offer, any technical information to Nick. We didn’t need to,” he said.