FIA president Max Mosley believes McLaren boss Ron Dennis lied about how much he knew about his team's involvement in Formula One's spying saga.

Dennis' team were fined $100 million [£50.2 million] and thrown out of the constructors' world championship for possessing confidential Ferrari technical information leaked to their now suspended chief designer Mike Coughlan.

But he continues to insist that he knew nothing of the information until driver Fernando Alonso tried to blackmail him with it in August, and alerted the authorities straight away after that.

Mosley though, thinks Dennis knew far more than he ever revealed to the FIA's World Motorsport Council.

"One can only say it's extremely improbable that Ron didn't know," Mosley told The Guardian newspaper. "Every time I speak to him he still assures me that he would never tell a lie, that he never has told a lie and that he hasn't lied to us.

"When you've known somebody for 40 years it's very difficult just to say, 'Well, I don't believe you.' But in the end no hard-nosed lawyer or policeman would believe it for a moment. I'm probably being a bit of a wimp about it."

Mosley believes that if Dennis had handled the matter differently, the penalties dealt out to McLaren would have been far more lenient.

"If, when Ron learnt about it, he had just called Jean Todt [of Ferrari] and said, 'Listen, you've got to know about Stepney,' we'd never even have heard about it," Mosley added.

"The next opportunity was when they got caught with all the documents, and he should have just come to the world council and said, 'Look, I'm really sorry, a few of my people know about it and I'm going to eradicate it.'

"There would have been a very modest fine and maybe [a deduction of] a few points at the most and it would all have been over.

"As the police say, we went where the evidence took us and we had no choice but to do that. If we'd swept it under the carpet or pretended it wasn't important I think everyone would have lost faith in our ability to regulate the sport."

Mosley insisted though, that the punishment handed out served as a warning to any other teams found cheating, in spite of the lack of penalty handed out to Renault for possessing McLaren information.

"Everyone understands these rules now. Teams know that this sort of action won't be tolerated," he added.

"You cannot take even one drawing with you if you switch teams. We have made it clear to them that if they do this then they are at the risk of being excluded from the championship."

Jamie O'Leary / Eurosport