For months now the former CEO of AOL Jonathan Miller has been looking for the money to buy Yahoo, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The paper was apparently inspired by the Times of London, which claimed over the weekend – in a story that the Journal trashed at “total fiction” – that Miller and his partner Ross Levinsohn, the ex-president of Fox Interactive Media, were part of a convoluted cabal to take over Yahoo and sell off its search business to Microsoft.

Miller and Levinsohn are involved in the VC fund Velocity Interactive Group together.

Anyway, the Journal now claims that Miller – who can’t sit on Yahoo’s board because of his non-compete with Time Warner – has been talking to private equity investors and sovereign wealth funds for months trying to scrape together the money to take out Yahoo for $20-$22 a share.

At those rates he would need $28 billion-$30 billion although Yahoo’s market cap is now under $16 billion.

The Journal, quoting sources, doesn’t give Miller odds since money is hard to come by right now and the deal would be risky since advertising is in the proverbial loo.

The paper couldn’t find out whether Microsoft would be involved in this particular deal though practically everybody seems to think it will eventually do a Yahoo deal.