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The Astana team has missed a preliminary deadline to file required paper work as part of the UCI’s annual review of teams’ ProTour status.

Astana was one of five teams that missed the October 20 deadline, but may be the team that suffers the most immediate consequences, since UCI rules allow riders on teams that have missed that deadline to terminate existing contracts.

Under UCI rules all ProTour teams are required to submit an application for registration the following year by October 20. The rules do allow for late-filings as long as they are submitted in advance of the UCI licensing commission’s review of submitted paper work after November 20.

Astana, Saxo Bank, Euskaltel-Euskadi, Caisse d’Epargne and the new Sky team, were not among the 13 teams listed by the UCI on Thursday as having met the deadline.

The most immediate problem for Astana is that the team’s failure to comply with the October 20 deadline may provide Tour de France winner Alberto Contador with a legal basis to get out of the final year of his contract.

Contador has completed two years of a three-year contract with the team, but has repeatedly expressed a desire to leave the team before its expiration at the end of 2010.

UCI rules include a number of required provisions that must be included in rider contracts. Among those are termination provisions that allow a rider to “terminate the present contract, without notice nor liability for damages,” if certain conditions or circumstances occur.

Included in that list are a team’s bankruptcy, loss of ProTour status and one provision that may serve as the key to Contador’s early exit from the team:

if, on 20 October of the year preceding a year of registration covered by the present contract, the UCI ProTeam has not submitted a registration file containing the essential documents listed in art. 2.15.069bis.

The referenced rule 2.15.169b, added to UCI regulations in July of this year, requires that teams submit documents outlining their proposed budget for the coming year, signed sponsorship contracts, a bank guarantee and signed contracts with at least 12 riders.

Those documents will then be reviewed by the UCI and the accounting firm Ernst & Young to determine if they are in compliance with UCI and ProTour rules, “particularly in terms of their administration and financing.”

Jonathan Vaughters, who is currently serving as president of the group representing ProTour teams, the AIGCP, told VeloNews that the group’s membership supports the new and stricter requirement.

“All of the teams are supportive of having extremely high standards,” said Vaughters, who is also manager of the Garmin-Slipstream team. “It’s essential, if our sport is to be thought of as professional.

“The bar has to be high,” he added, “and our standards have to be impeccable.”

The Astana team suffered a mass exodus of riders earlier in the year, when Lance Armstrong left to form the new RadioShack squad. In addition to recruiting team manager Johan Bruyneel to join him, the team also recruited Levi Leipheimer, Chris Horner, Andreas Klöden, Sergio Paulinho, Janez Brajkovič, Gregory Rast, Yaroslav Popovych and Gregory Rast.