Finnish tech entrepreneur Thomas Zilliacus says his group were serious about buying Inter Milan.

Zilliacus has now offered greater detail of where his bid currently stands.

He told the Italian Football Podcast: “No, I'm not out of the race to buy Inter because I want to be out of the race. One of the byproducts of all this negative publicity of these ridiculous stories about Interpol, my arrest and this and that, is that of course it affects people who read it.

“So, the result was, some investors in the consortium that I had put together withdrew and told me that it's until this thing is settled.

“I had to therefore announce that I could no longer proceed because of these false claims, because as I explained earlier, they are false claims. So, I had to, but that doesn't mean I don't want to. It was a storm in a waterglass. But yes, until this situation has been resolved I'm not involved in buying any club."

On talks with Inter owners Suning in February, he continued: “The talks were very advanced. When this news broke (Singapore case, ed.) in late February, we were very, very close to I think wrapping the whole thing up.

“We had committed investors, we made a first bid already in July, the discussions started in May. We made a second bid in November because we wanted to update the July bid on the basis of certain things that had happened in between.

“But it was a very serious bid, it was a complete bid, I had as my advisors one of the largest investment banks in the world with offices in every major financial centre in the world, including in Milan. A name that everybody knows but I can't mention who for contractual reasons.

“However, they (investment bank, ed.) had a big team working on this together with me, on top of that we had lawyers, advisers from Italy, auditors, people who had been on the board of Inter, people who really knew the ins and outs of everything. So, we had a very good and detailed bid.

“It was a bid for 100% of the ownership of the club. We would never have made a bit if we hadn't been told that they had a serious interest to sell.

“We know more or less what the expectation was with regards to the evaluation of the club. But everything else had been done, the due diligence had been done, we had a complete and concrete offer for the club with an exact value that we were prepared to pay.

“Everything was there. We never came that far with Manchester United but with Inter it was a completely different situation as we had time to prepare, having one of the biggest investment banks as an adviser in the world involved, with all their resources really helped.

“But I cannot say that Suning was willing to accept our offer because I don't know that. What I can say is that the offer was similar or very close to what was expected.

“We appointed another US and New York based investment bank specialized in American fundraising primarily but also with a global network.

“I am again not allowed to say who it was, but these two investment banks jointly brought in big private equity firms and together with my network we had a network similar to RedBird to move forward to purchase and invest in the club. But it all fell apart due to these false claims that came out of Singapore."