They were found guilty at the first hearing but as they argued only their chief engineer had it and it didn't benefit them they didn't really get a punishment. Only that if further evidence comes to light that the info was used they could face a 2 year ban.
FIA president set up an appeal as Ferrrari and a few other thought you can benefit from technical data by other ways than just copying parts and that the chief engineering having it is bad enough as it is.
FIA now seem to have been tipped of or something that it was more widespread than this and requested email and other correspondence between the team drivers. AFAIK they cooperated with this.
There's meant to be emails where De La Rosa is telling Alsono that they now know how the Ferrari's work so well with the Bridgestones. If true it becomes obvious that quiet a few people must have had access to this data if the teams main test driver has been working on its secrets. Ferrari stuck with Bridgestone when there were 2 manufacturers and spent years learning about the Bridgestones. Now it looks like thanks to the Ferrari data McLaren didn't have to work on the setup but just saw what Ferrari had done.
Again if true it kinda makes a mockery of Ron Dennis saying the data wasn't shared with any other team members and that it wasn't used in any way. Sounds as believable as the Iraqi Information Minister saying there were no tanks in Baghdad. Either he didn't know about it (in which case he doesn't have a clue what his team are doing) or he did and lied about it.
If these emails do exists and/or there's other evidence that we haven't heard about yet then the team need to be punished and quite severely at that, both constructors and drivers championships. They won't be banned and I think it wouldn't be good for the future of the sport if they were. But maybe something like they can't score points in the last races of the season and the first couple of next would be a compromise.
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