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Jumbo - QuickStep merger

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According to Plugge, the merger was called off to prevent one team being left in limbo (I presume he means quickstep).
"I entered into a conspiracy to murder and spoke publicly about how much benefit that I could gain from it, but then realised that it would end up with somebody being dead."

Is this some sort of appeal to the public that he does have a heart, and he cares about the well-being of teams other than his own?

Let's all love him as the man who saved Soudal-QS: doesn't wash.
 
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"I entered into a conspiracy to murder and spoke publicly about how much benefit that I could gain from it, but then realised that it would end up with somebody being dead."
One hesitates to suggest facts matter, especially round here, but in all fairness Plugge didn't speak publicly about the merger. All the public (dis)info came via Lefevere.
 
“The discussion didn’t work out for a number of reasons,” Plugge said of the talks with Zdenek Bakala, the owner of the Soudal-QuickStep, alongside team manager Patrick Lefevere.

“One of the reasons was that after our discussions with the UCI, we found that there wasn’t a good solution for both teams; we didn’t want one team left in limbo.”
link

I would take limbo here to mean financial limbo, it was too difficult to extract value from the WT licence in the time available, leaving Bakala just chucking that investment in the bin.
 
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