Michael van Praag, who returns to Ajax as chairman of the Supervisory Board, gave sports journalist Valentijn Driessen the wind of the day during NH Sportcafé. Driessen recently wrote a column about the return of both Van Praag and Leo van Wijk and it went completely wrong with Van Praag.
Van Praag and Driessen were both at the table last Saturday at the radio program NH Radio Sportcafé, where Van Praag quickly expressed his dissatisfaction with the column. In that column the journalist writes, among other things: ‘With Van Praag and Van Wijk, Boekhorst opts for the old, almost incestuous Ajax clique in the supervisory board (…) The proposed appointment of Van Praag and Van Wijk as commissioners of Ajax has every appearance of being a mutual service of friendship. The purity is hard to find.’
According to Van Praag, this appointment is anything but a favor, because the works council and the Association of Securities Owners could still object to their appointment.
Van Praag: “The only thing you do by acting like this (…) is to debunk your own story. You’re horny about getting messages from me and in the meantime you’re just insulting me in public. All your life you wanted information from me. We even had a clash at Geneva airport on Valentine’s Day. You can continue to do that, but you must not insult me and neither should you insult Leo.”
Defamation
Presenter Leo Driessen makes another attempt to calm things down, but Van Praag wants nothing to do with it: “I’m not going to respond kindly to this anymore, because I’ve had this for twenty years, Leo,” he says. “I’ve been grinding this ax for twenty years and now I’m done with it.”
The journalist is also accused of defamation by Van Praag, but the new chairman is not going to do anything about it. “I’m above that,” he says. When asked by the presenter whether things will still work out between the two, Van Praag answers: “I have had my say. I am not hateful, I have never been that way. But you have to know what you are writing and you have to be careful that it is also correct.”
Listen to the entire broadcast here:
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