In the Today Insidebroadcast on Friday evening, table guest Hélène Hendriks dissects the complete chaos at Ajax. Johan Derksen calls a number of decisions taken by the club’s Supervisory Board, currently chaired by Michael van Praag, in recent years a ‘disaster for that company’.
It became clear on Thursday that Van Praag failed to inform the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) upon his appointment as Supervisory Board chairman that he owns one hundred club shares. He already purchased this when Ajax, under his chairmanship, became the first and so far only Dutch club to go public. Earlier in the week, the new general manager Alex Kroes was suspended by the Supervisory Board because he appeared to own a – much larger – share package, the last part of which he owned just before he received confirmation in the summer of 2023. that he would take up his ‘dream job’ in the Johan Cruijff ArenA.
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Derksen agrees with the Ajax board of directors, which, unlike the Supervisory Board, is in majority for a milder attitude towards Kroes. “It was stupid of him (Kroes, ed.), it was stupid,” says the mustachioed analyst. “It’s driving through a red light. But I think it’s shameful when you hear what happened to Van Praag. He says he made an administrative error and Alex Kroes committed a crime. That’s a bit of selective indignation. Maybe they find Kroes too difficult.”
That opinion is widely shared at the table. Hendriks therefore suspects that Kroes’ suspension has a reason other than the share package that the founder of SEG and former Go Ahead Eagles owner and AZ director holds. “It’s a tribal battle. It just depends on how much you want it.” Derksen also thinks that Kroes has stumbled over his intention to get rid of ‘that very old thing’: “Then you get these kinds of scenes.”
And while the Supervisory Board ‘also has a lot of mistakes on its conscience’, Derksen states: “They brought in the wrong director (Sven Mislintat, ed.), and the wrong manager, that hockey player and so on (Maurits Hendriks, ed.) . That has been a disaster for that company.” Genee concludes that Kroes buying shares ‘has nothing to do with self-enrichment. Derksen endorses this: “No, this is peanuts. That man is a multi-millionaire, he has a fortune of fifteen million. So that’s not it.”
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