Honda and Alpine have been given big fines for procedural breaches of F1s budget cap as engine manufacturers; watch the Sao Paulo Grand Prix Sprint weekend from this Friday live on Sky Sports F1
What did Honda and Alpine do wrong?
Honda submitted a report with "incorrectly excluded and/or adjusted costs" while Alpine's report submission contained "significant deficiencies" including partial or no procedures being performed
Purposely excluding costs, or straight up lying about how much things cost, only gets a fine that's a drop in the bucket compared to what they'll make?
Alpines looks to be a complete balls up, as it traditional for Alpine and paperwork, I do not suspect any malicious intent here just plain old incompetence as is to be expected with Alpine. This is the company that made changes to their own version of Oscars contract to their advantage, seemingly forgetting that both the FIA and Mark Weber had their owned signed copies of the original.
They said there is no accusation / proof that they got an unfair advantage, it was because of the reports sucking that they had to clarify, which sometimes took longer because they stalled.
Where does it say they did it on purpose? It says they omitted information that was relevant. It also says that they complied with requests for the additional information (one of them immediately, the other after a delay, hence bigger fine). It also says they found it that it didn't give them any advantage.
I'd rather trust the article, than a conspiracy theory.