“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty I am free at last!”
Billionaire celebrity investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has been freed from the harsh confines of the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, according to family sources cited by Reuters on Saturday.
Since his detention in November, Alwaleed has come to symbolize the Saudi purge which, you’re reminded, is just a shakedown dressed up as an effort to root out “corruption”.
That’s not to say there’s no graft in Saudi Arabia. Rather, it’s that if you made an honest list of things Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was trying to accomplish with the crackdown, rooting out corruption would not be at the very top of that list. MbS is attempting first and foremost to consolidate power and secondarily, to extract enough cash from the accused to help shore up depleted SAMA reserves.
One of the many ironies inherent in this whole spectacle is that MbS is effectively saying that in order to modernize Saudi Arabia, it’s first necessary to do a couple of things that, to the outside world, seem rather draconian. Not everyone is on board with the push to liberalize the country and the crackdown sends a message to hardliners that it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks at this point. There’s an extra layer of irony inherent in the Alwaleed arrest. He’s variously pushed for modernization over the years and he is of course a cousin of the Crown Prince.
The purge was the second high profile effort to concentrate power in the hands of MbS. Last June, in what amounted to a soft coup, he replaced his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef as heir to the throne.
Arguably the most notable figure besides Alwaleed to find himself caught up in the early November sweep was Prince Miteb bin Abdullah. The son of the late King Abdullah, his ouster meant the Shammar branch of the family would no longer hold any top positions in government. Miteb was later freed after agreeing to pay some $1 billion to settle the corruption charges leveled against him.
For his part, Alwaleed was asked to cough up some $6 billion, a demand he had been resisting. Although he’s worth nearly $19 billion, the ransom (because that’s what it is) would imperil his business empire, a snapshot of which is below courtesy of WSJ:
“Prince al-Waleed has indicated that he believes raising and handing over that much cash as an admission of guilt and would require him to dismantle the financial empire he has built over 25 years,” sources close to the prince told WSJ last month, whose Margherita Stancati, added that “Prince al-Waleed is talking with the government about instead accepting as payment for his release a large piece of his conglomerate, Kingdom Holding Co.”
Shares of Kingdom Holding plunged upon news of Alwaleed’s detention and have remained under pressure:
The problem for MbS when it comes to Alwaleed is that, as alluded to above, this has the potential to become a PR debacle. Alwaleed is a prominent international figure and keeping him locked up in the Ritz effectively keeps the story alive in the media.
“The Alwaleed case will define the crackdown to western investors,” Emily Hawthorne, Middle East and North Africa analyst at Stratfor told Bloomberg late last month, adding that “the longer Prince Alwaleed remains behind closed doors, the more the government appears the unreasonable actor.”
On Friday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that despite having already extracted some $100 billion in the purge, MbS is now “stepping up pressure on detained members of the country’s elite resisting his demands for billions of dollars in payments–moving them from a luxury hotel to prison and threatening them with prosecution.”
Apparently, nearly 100 “holdouts” are actually going to be tried after refusing to pay. Of course “trials” would be an epic farce, so I’m not entirely sure that would be a great idea from an international relations perspective, but whatever the case, getting money from the holdouts is going to be harder than MbS imagined. “The Saudi leadership is now realizing that you can’t just press the button ‘give me the money’ because there’s no such button in the first place,” a Europe-based financial adviser with clients detained in Saudi Arabia told the Journal.
WSJ also said Alwaleed “has been moved from the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton to a palace compound in eastern Riyadh surrounded by a recently added barbed-wire fence.”
It’s not 100% clear what that means – that is, did they just send him home on the condition he put up some barbed-wire?
Well last night, on the heels of the WSJ piece, Reuters got an exclusive interview with Alwaleed who said he expected to be cleared of any wrongdoing and to ultimately be released from custody within days. Here’s a fun picture they snapped of the prince hanging out at the Riyadh Ritz next to some memorabilia of himself.
Hours later, he was free and according to sources, he’s back at the crib.
“He has he arrived home,” a family source said.
Additionally, he’s maintaining his innocence.
So we’ll see how this plays out. Did MbS finally give up and decide that it wasn’t worth the negative publicity for a “lousy” $6 billion when he can easily hold kangaroo courts and force a bunch of people no one cares about to fork over multiples of that amount collectively? Or was there a settlement that no one knows the details of?
According to Bloomberg, citing a senior government official, Alwaleed will remain in charge of Kingdom Holding “after reaching a settlement with Saudi authorities.”
No details of the settlement with the attorney general were made public, although the official did say this:
Settlements don’t happen unless the accused acknowledges violations and documents that in writing and pledges that he won’t repeat them. This is the general principle of all who were detained in corruption cases recently and not only Alwaleed bin Talal.
Who knows. But I guess Alwaleed can now get back to doing CNBC cameos and trolling Trump on Twitter.
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if i was Alwaleed, I'd go out and immediately buy something crazy just to prove to everyone I'm still rich.
like maybe i'd buy a rare tiger cub and dress that little fucker up in a little customized outfit made of fine linen and diamond-encrusted silk.
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) January 27, 2018
anyone know the tab on that 3 month stay at the Ritz? including all extra room charges, itemized separately.
I might want a reservation.
For a while you could NOT get a reservation at the Ritz – it was full of Saudi ‘criminals’…. lol.
I suggest a coffee cup with the tiger’s photo on it for sale in the Riyadh airport. r.
ya know, I have read so much crap on so many subjects that I may be a bit confused. When I read about this Saudi reformation (right word?) I tend to interject “criminals putting other criminals in temporary housing for a ransom”. In America we just call it kidnapping? or imprisonment without trial? or does their version of trump just declare them guilty and store them somewhere for a few months while they rifle the palace?
Oh, can trump now find this place on the map and can he check the right box on the multiple choice test – near east – middle east – far east. We should make an effort to keep all the trumps out of Saudi Arabia and away from that glowing orb thing.