One of the Middle East’s richest families is in negotiations to buy Liverpool as the Arab invasion of the Barclays Premier League continues. It emerged last night that the Al-Kharafi family, of Kuwait, are planning a bid to buy the Merseyside club for £500 million as Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr prepare to sell up.

Hicks and Gillett, the club’s American owners, maintain publicly that they have no plans to sell Liverpool, but they have been actively searching for a buyer for several months, with an asking price of £600 million. Gillett is expected to be the first to depart, but Hicks is also increasingly open to a sale, having authorised Ian Ayre and Phillip Nash, the club’s commercial director and finance director respectively, to hold talks with the Al-Kharafi family this week.

Initially, the talks focused on investment in the club’s proposed new stadium in Stanley Park, but a full-scale takeover is now the subject of serious discussions. It also emerged last night that an Arab tycoon behind the takeover of Manchester City is working with a group of German investors on a possible bid for Chelsea.

The Times revealed in November that a group from Kuwait had expressed interest in buying Liverpool and that an Arab group, having inspected the company’s accounts, had made a firm offer for the club, only to withdraw from the deal without explanation. It has emerged that this was the Al-Kharafi family, whose wealth is estimated at £8 billion. The family subsequently registered an interest in buying Newcastle United but have now their sights set firmly on Liverpool.

The Al-Kharafi family are led by two brothers, Nasser and Jassem, but the planned purchase of Liverpool is likely to be a project overseen by one of their sons. The family made their fortune from a variety of enterprises, including construction, banking, engineering, telecommunications and fast food. Nasser is a highly successful businessman who runs M. A. Kharafi & Sons, which oversees the family’s interests, while Jassem is an influential politician who has served for the past nine years as the speaker in the Kuwait National Assembly.

The family’s plans for Liverpool are not known, but their interest is likely to be encouraged by the club’s supporters, who are hostile to Hicks and Gillett. The pair made heartening noises when they bought the club for £218.9 million in February 2007, but their regime has caused chaos behind the scenes, reflected by the failure to begin building work on a new stadium and by fractious relationships with each other and with Rafael Benítez, whose future as manager is in jeopardy as his contract dispute continues.

Peter Kenyon, the Chelsea chief executive, has been eager to emphasise Roman Abramovich’s long-term commitment to the club, but that has not stopped Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim, who led the Abu Dhabi United Group’s purchase of Manchester City in September, drawing up a takeover proposal with Falcon Equity, a Swiss-based private-equity partnership. It is understood that it has a number of German investors ready to fund any buyout.