Dutch football club Ajax announced on Tuesday that it had suspended its new CEO, Alex Kroes, over suspicions that he is guilty of insider trading, the practice of people buying or selling shares of a certain company because they own of confidential information thanks to their work and role (within the company itself or not). Kroes, who is 49 years old and Dutch, only took office in mid-March, but his arrival was announced by the club on 2 August 2023: the Ajax supervisory board said that a week before that announcement Kroes would have bought more than 17 thousand shares of the club, which is listed on the stock exchange. In a statement, the Ajax supervisory board said it believed it was likely, also on the basis of some legal advice it requested, that Kroes had engaged in insider trading.
After the news broke, Kroes wrote on LinkedIn that he had been buying shares in the club for some time before his hire was announced, from April 2022 to July 2023. He said at the time he wasn’t yet sure he would go to Ajax, even though he had “good feelings” about it, and that he saw buying shares in the club as a positive thing, because in his opinion sharing the financial risks showed his trust in the club. He also told the Dutch news agency ANP that it will ask the Netherlands’ financial watchdog, the AFM, to initiate proceedings over its purchase of Ajax shares.
Ajax is the team from Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, and is by far the most important and successful football team in the country’s history. This season, from a footballing point of view, things are going badly: Ajax is only fifth in the league, 28 points behind the top of the table, PSV Eindhoven, despite having spent more than 100 million euros in last summer’s signing campaign .
2024-04-02 16:08:09
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