Modular Multilevel Converters (MMC) are popular in Medium Voltage inverter applications. Voltage ripple on submodule capacitors limits their application range as motor drives at low frequency. The flying capacitor passive cross connected arms MMC allows to solve this issue, by applying high frequency voltage and current injection. However, in this topology, the pre-charge of the flying capacitor and sub-module (SM) bus capacitors are major issues to address since L C oscillations (due to the interaction between the sub arm inductor and flying capacitor) can lead to converter damage. A novel pre charge/start up control strategy is proposed in this paper, which avoids uncontrolled oscillations, does not require a separate power supply for the control logic and manages any capacitance mismatch of the SM bus capacitors. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by a FC MMC based permanent magnet synchronous machine drive. The proposed strategy also guarantees that the machine current during the start up procedure remains small enough, in order to keep the uncontrolled torque negligible.