Marseille (AFP)

"Everything is for sale", launched Tuesday the Franco-Tunisian businessman Mohamed Ayachi Ajroudi who wants to buy Olympique de Marseille (OM) but he has attracted a new end of inadmissibility from the owner of the club Franck McCourt, who evokes an "attempt of destabilization".

In an interview with AFP, Mohamed Ayachi Ajroudi assured not to be "an intermediary" or a "suitcase carrier": the project of "buying Olympique de Marseille, it's our idea with my team", he explained.

"Everything is for sale and everything is to buy," he said, before a spokesperson for Franck McCourt reaffirmed "unequivocally" that OM was "not for sale".

"There is no discussion of any kind whatsoever with Mr. Ajroudi or his partners contrary to what is reported in the media," assured a spokesman for the American businessman on Tuesday evening.

"We are witnessing an attempt to destabilize the club, continues OM, at the precise moment when it is going through its most auspicious and most successful period since the takeover of Frank McCourt" in October 2016.

Mohamed Ayachi Ajroudi is associated with the former director of the Toulon rugby club Mourad Boudjellal for his project to buy OM, mounted with Saudi funds.

"We have been preparing for a long time. We don't throw ourselves into the fray like that," he said.

- "500 million Mediterranean people" -

He does not mention figures but ensures that the consortium will "put money" to "develop the club."

He also does not give a date, recalling that "before making an offer by a merchant bank, we must know the liabilities and assets, we will not make a blind offer".

"I am an industrialist, insists Ajroudi, I am not the intermediary of anyone. Redeeming OM is our idea with my team, I am not the suitcase carrier for the Saudis, the Kuwaitis or anyone else on this Earth."

"OM would be the driving force of a larger project", which he details as "humanitarian, social but also economic, intended to flourish at the very heart of the Vélodrome stadium", a project bringing together the "500 million Mediterranean people" ".

It minimizes the geopolitical "soft power" part of the operation: it is not a question of "Saudis arriving and going to fight against the Qataris of Paris SG".

Besides, Ajroudi specifies that "the Saudis and the Emiratis will not exceed the majority" of the round table.

In its vision, Olympique de Marseille is on a "crusade for peace".

© 2020 AFP