Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, was warned by Bernie Ecclestone two months before his private life was exposed in a Sunday newspaper that people had been hired to discredit him and that they had been given an “unlimited budget” to do so, according to an intelligence consultant.

Rather than being a party to a conspiracy to destroy his old friend, as Mosley's spokesman has hinted this week, The Times can reveal that Ecclestone did his best to tell Mosley that he was being targeted and was astonished and angry when it became obvious that Mosley had ignored the advice he was given.

Ecclestone discovered that there was a plot to bring down the FIA president through Dean Attew, a London-based business intelligence consultant who used to work for the Formula One rights-holder and has also advised Mosley. In an exclusive interview with The Times, Attew disclosed that he was contacted in the third week of January this year by someone representing people who wanted Mosley removed from office.

The approach came more than two months before the News of the World published its first revelations and a video showing Mosley taking part in a five-hour sadomasochistic bondage session with five prostitutes in a “torture dungeon” in Chelsea, West London, which included alleged Nazi prison camp role play.

Attew, a co-founder of Titon International, the corporate intelligence company, said: “In January this year I received a call from a friend. We had a meeting and I was approached and told there was an open budget to effectively go out and source material that would bring Max to his knees and, more importantly, remove him from office and discredit him publicly.

“During the conversation I said to the guy, 'What's your budget?' and he said, 'It's an open budget,' and I said, 'OK, be specific here, are you after Max, are you after the FIA or are you after Bernie?' They then went back and they came back a little while later and said, 'We are not going to pursue it for the time being.' The person contacted me because they knew of my relationship with Bernie but did not know of my relationship with Max. The reason they contacted me was to find out whether I had any loyalty to Max and whether I knew anything of value.”

Attew said that he considered the contact to be credible and he took the conversation seriously. Rather than assist the contact, Attew informed Ecclestone. “I sat down with Bernie and told him what I'd heard,” Attew said. “Bernie then told Max - I know this because Max later confirmed this to me. Because of the relationship I have with both of them, and Max knowing who I was, I assumed that the warning would be taken seriously.”

Attew recalls that at that stage Ecclestone doubted that Mosley had any secrets to hide and had no idea about Mosley's predilection for orgies with prostitutes. “When I sat down with Bernie I said to him, 'Is there anything anyone is going to find out about Max?'” Attew said. “And Bernie said, 'Dean, you are not going to find anything because there's nothing there - he's Mr Boring in that sense.' Mosley had kept this a good secret.”

Two days after the first story on the scandal had been published, Attew contacted Mosley after being asked to do so by Ecclestone, who, despite his anger at what had transpired, wanted Attew to give whatever assistance or advice he could to the FIA president. During this phone call, Attew says that Mosley admitted that he had received the warning from Ecclestone in January and that he had been warned by someone else, too. Attew also says that Mosley conveyed to him detailed personal information about his private life during that phone call, which Attew does not wish to disclose.

Attew, who heads Titon International in partnership with Major-General John Holmes, a former director of UK Special Forces, believes that Mosley or his spokesman could have disclosed these details in recent weeks, rather than leave speculation linking Ecclestone to the exposé to fester. It is for this reason that he has taken the unprecedented step of coming out of the shadows to set the record straight.

“I hear things about people suggesting Bernie was behind this, but that is ridiculous,” Attew said. “From the very first indication Bernie and I, with Max's knowledge, have tried to find out who was the source.”

Attew is also angry at the way Mosley ignored the advice that he was given. “It was very clear that Max had disregarded both the advice he had been given and had failed to realise his vulnerability at that stage,” Attew said. “The issue for me was his total disregard for genuine advice from individuals that he knew had his best interests at heart. When we saw what was in the News of the World, Bernie was as flabbergasted as I was.”

Attew was on Ecclestone's staff for four years until 2004 and had a desk at Ecclestone's London office, where he assisted with a wide variety of issues concerning Ecclestone's business and family affairs. Titon International was in the news two years ago when it emerged that Alexander Litvinenko, the murdered former KGB agent, had worked for the company as a consultant on Russian business. Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, traces of which were found at Titon's offices, in Grosvenor Street, Mayfair.