Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia universally known as MBS, is offering blue-chip multinational ventures, including a 50-year tax holiday to relocate to the capital Riyadh, as he seeks to rehabilitate himself as a pro-business modernizer after the disastrous reputation damage of the assassination of the state-approved Jamal Khashoggi.
However, efforts to fill some of the 59 skyscrapers of Riyadh’s troubled King Abdullah Business Park with the headquarters of prestigious IT and finance companies were largely unsuccessful.
Companies, including Google and Siemens, want to maintain their local hubs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), despite being targeted under the initiative, codenamed Program HQ, according to a report in London’s Financial Times. Program HQ itself is part of MBS’s ten-year master plan to deplete the country of oil revenue, Vision2030, which also includes the construction of a large $ 500 million pleasure city to try to compete with Dubai as a tourist destination.
Despite the fact that a star industry has not yet been attracted, some large companies are increasing their presence in Saudi Arabia and opening or enlarging the offices in the park.
Google Cloud, for example, last month agreed with Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, to provide cloud computing services infrastructure, which will lead to the technology company opening its first office in the kingdom. Alibaba and Western Union have also reportedly expanded their footprint in the country and opened larger offices.
The influential Saudi officials have been tasked with fulfilling MBS’s wishes by attracting businesses from neighboring jurisdictions such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. These UAE city stateletees are far more cosmopolitan and liberal than the ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is still completely banned, there is no question of Western social life and women are second-class citizens.
MBS ‘response to these social and gender restrictions, which is embedded in Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi-influenced culture, was to begin work on a $ 500 billion tourist and recreational city called NEOM. NEOM, will be 1,000 kilometers from Riyadh on the Red Sea, and otherwise forbidden Western pleasures are allowed there. The resort city will have a parallel legal system led directly by MBS. While it is supposed to make foreigners feel safe, it can have the opposite effect, given its murderous reputation.
Justin Scheck, co-author of Blood and oil, the best-selling biography of Mohammed bin Salman, told The Daily Beast: “The biggest challenge MBS has in rebuilding the Saudi economy is to get foreign companies to invest in Saudi Arabia. Even before Khashoggi, the way the foreign business leaders wanted to do business with him was different from the way he wanted to do business with them. They just wanted him to give them money. He wanted them to invest in Saudi Arabia. Despite all these attractions, it did not happen. ”
Scheck says there are concerns about the country’s ethical standards and that the Khashoggi affair has ‘made it harder than expected’ to attract large companies. Even Uber, in which the Saudis own a 5.3 percent stake, has condemned the country and its leadership over the 2018 assassination of Khashoggi.
MBS made only significant gestures about transparency about the murder: eight unknown persons were sentenced in a secret trial to imprisonment for seven to twenty years for the murder of Khashoggi. MBS did not accept responsibility for ordering the murder, although the CIA and a UN investigation concluded that he was guilty. Saudi authorities have never said what happened to Khashoggi’s body after his body was cut up in the country’s Turkish embassy with a jigsaw.
A new movie, Oscar-hiped documentary The dissident, will make it even harder for Saudi Arabia to continue the whitewash. The film’s director Bryan Fogel gains access to the room where Khashoggi was killed and reports that his body was probably transported to the Saudi consul’s house and burned in a tandoor oven.
Scheck points out that the small population of Saudi Arabia is a major factor in why many Western companies are not interested in tackling MBS’s investment invitations, even for the companies willing to take on the country’s ongoing and blatant to take away human rights abuses. breaks or special carvings from local laws he offers.
‘The only thing he can not correct is that as rich as the country has a population about the size of Mexico City. So why would you want to build a car factory there? The local market is just not big enough, ”says Scheck.
Understanding this demographic fate, MBS is now urgently trying to attract international headquarters to fill the gap and help Saudi Arabia become a normal tax-based economy rather than one financed by the ever-declining oil wealth.
For MBS, carrying out this transition is now a deeply personal mission, and one that has cemented its reputation, staffing divisions of foreign companies are reassured that their staff can let their hair down at NEOM. While strategy documents leaked last year, including plans for a huge artificial moon, glowing beaches and flying drone taxis, the reality so far is only that the project is still a troubled Saudi construction site, caught up in allegations of corruption, death and malpractice .
One Saudi-based expat told The Daily Beast that he was following the “Sheikhdown” in 2017, in which hundreds of prominent Saudis were detained at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, and in some cases beaten and tortured until their confessions of corruption and governing large amounts of government, there was little appetite to criticize MBS: ‘Many people think NEOM is going to be a disaster without disaster. It looks like a city drawn by a toddler. But no one is going to say that. MBS can throw you in jail just because you disagree with him. ‘
Scheck says such criticism merely asks MBS to double its lunar shot plans. “For MBS, his legitimacy as future monarch of the country is bound in the success of Vision 2030. When people criticize things like NEOM, he just digs his heels further.”
It seems likely that any small successes in attracting tenants, as a regional expedition, will be abundantly packaged and launched at the annual investor conference of the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund chaired by MBS, and launched on 27 January.
One executive has given to the FT he believes the kingdom hopes to use the conference to use agreements with companies that have tentatively agreed to make the switch from Dubai to Riyadh.
A Saudi government adviser who briefed on the plans said: ‘This is about attracting key international anchor tenants. ‘
Incentives offered include a 50-year tax holiday, relinquishing Saudi employment quotas and guarantees of protection against future regulations.
Another source with close ties to many senior Saudis who have been jailed by MBS or are currently languishing under house arrest told The Daily Beast: ‘Saudi royals are very used to getting their own sense. The vast majority of people in prison or in custody are not threatened with him; he simply cannot tolerate the prospect that they may disagree. ”
The source points to the recent imprisonment of Loujain al-Hathloul, 31, the activist who came to the forefront of the successful campaign to allow women to drive. In December, it was announced that she would be sentenced to five years in prison. Her rap page? “Call for change.”
The source says: “It is just not credible that large American companies will identify with a regime. They might get a bottom feeder. But companies with a public shareholding in the cancellation culture? They’re going to run a mile. ‘