Ajax chair Michael van Praag blames the club for revealing his shareholding too late

Ajax Supervisory Board Chair Michael van Praag blamed the Amsterdam club for his shares being registered with regulators too late. Van Praag wrote this in a post on LinkedIn this week hoping to clarify the unrest surrounding the club and his own share ownership. "I have concealed nothing," he stated on the site.

Van Praag said he bought a hundred shares during the club's IPO in 1998. He said that he has never traded these shares and mentioned his ownership of the shares to Ajax when he was appointed. The club then communicated this to the shareholders. "They knew about it. I concealed nothing. What went wrong was that Ajax was supposed to report these shares to the AFM within 14 days of my appointment. Sadly, that did not happen, and this is an administrative omission."

Several days after Van Praag spoke harshly about Ajax CEO Alex Kroes and the allegations against him linked to insider trading, it became clear that Van Praag had not registered his own shares to the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). The shares have now been registered with the regulator.

The cases are very different because Kroes bought a much higher number of shares. He purchased 17,000 shares in the club a week before his appointment. was made public. Van Praag and the Supervisory Board are still planning to move forward with their plan to fire Kroes.

BNR reported earlier this week that Van Praag's ownership of shares was also a problem during his time as chair of the KNVB, the Dutch football association. He served in this role from 2008 to 2019. The news organization reported that it is not permitted to have a "financial gain in an organization that could potentially damage the interests of the KNVB."

The KNVB did not believe Van Praag violated any rules. Van Praag did not discuss this period in his LinkedIn post.

The Supervisory Board has suspended Kroes for his alleged insider trading and will have to discuss the matter with shareholders before deciding to fire him. That meeting will be held on May 21.

Some of the club's fans have spoken in support of Kroes, and have turned against Van Praag. The Executive Board at the club also asked the Supervisory Board to reconsider their plans to fire Kroes.