Saudi Arabia

[pipistrelle]

Jared's bff and Musk's investor.

[noblepa]

Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend.

[RTH10260]

Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s $6bn spend on ‘sportswashing’
Exclusive: Billions deployed since early 2021 in a move critics say is an attempt to distract from human rights record

Ruth Michaelson
Wed 26 Jul 2023 05.00 BST

Saudi Arabia has spent at least $6.3bn (£4.9bn) in sports deals since early 2021, more than quadruple the previous amount spent over a six-year period, in what critics have labelled an effort to distract from its human rights record.

Saudi Arabia has deployed billions from its Public Investment Fund over the last two-and-a-half years according to analysis by the Guardian, spending on sports at a scale that has completely changed professional golf and transformed the international transfer market for football.

On Monday, the Saudi Arabian club Al Hilal submitted a world-record bid for the French captain, Kylian Mbappé, understood to be worth €300m (£259m).

The $6.3bn investment is almost equivalent to the GDP of Montenegro or the island of Barbados. It dwarfs data compiled by Grant Liberty two years ago, estimating that Saudi Arabia spent $1.5bn in the period between 2014 and early 2021.

Rights groups including Grant Liberty, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch term such spending “sportswashing” – bankrolling big-name sporting events in order to distract from a poor record on human rights.

“Previously, sports figures and brands had rejected offers to engage with Saudi Arabia due to its well-documented human rights abuses,” said Grant Liberty. “However, there has been a worrisome shift in moral stance, as lucrative deals are now being accepted despite the ongoing and deteriorating violations.”

After the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia was broadly shunned, with many major corporations withdrawing or pausing investments in the country.

But the past two years have seen a shift in how the kingdom is regarded internationally. Joe Biden, who once promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the killing, travelled there last year, greeting the crown prince and de-facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, with a controversial fist bump.

The Guardian has compiled and analysed a list of investments made by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund – one of the 10 largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with assets estimated at $700bn – as well as other state bodies including the tourism authority, all signed since 2021. The $6.3bn total figure is probably an underestimate of the true amount, as the PIF is notoriously opaque about its finances, and details of some deals are not made public.




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... rtswashing

[busterbunker]

They export like a billion dollars of oil every day, just to put it in perspective. I got a feeling we're the folks who are paying for it.

[neonzx]

Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend.

I've said it before -- they are our drug dealer. OIL OIL OIL. Westerners can't get enough of their fix. Must protect our drug dealer.

[Frater I*I]

Saudi Arabia is NOT our friend.

I've said it before -- they are our drug dealer. OIL OIL OIL. Westerners can't get enough of their fix. Must protect our drug dealer.

Gasoline....it's America's crack...wanna another hit muthaf----!!!

[RTH10260]

Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s grand plan to ‘hook’ poor countries on oil
Climate scientists say fossil fuel use needs to fall rapidly – but oil-rich kingdom is working to drive up demand

Damian Carrington Environment editor
Mon 27 Nov 2023 20.00 CET

Saudi Arabia is driving a huge global investment plan to create demand for its oil and gas in developing countries, an undercover investigation has revealed. Critics said the plan was designed to get countries “hooked on its harmful products”.

Little was known about theoil demand sustainability programme (ODSP) but the investigation obtained detailed information on plans to drive up the use of fossil fuel-powered cars, buses and planes in Africa and elsewhere, as rich countries increasingly switch to clean energy.

The ODSP plans to accelerate the development of supersonic air travel, which it notes uses three times more jet fuel than conventional planes, and partner with a carmaker to mass produce a cheap combustion engine vehicle. Further plans promote power ships, which use polluting heavy fuel oil or gas to provide electricity to coastal communities.

The ODSP is overseen by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, and involves its biggest organisations, such as the $700bn Public Investment Fund, the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, the petrochemicals firm Sabic, and the government’s most important ministries.

In publicly available information, the programme is largely presented as “removing barriers” to energy and transport in poorer countries and “increasing sustainability”, for example by providing gas cooking stoves to replace wood burning.

However, all the planned projects revealed in the investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting and Channel 4 News involve increasing the use of oil and gas. An official said this was “one of the main objectives”.

The head of the World Bank said recently that rich countries and companies needed to help developing countries leapfrog over the fossil-fuelled economic growth of the past and roll out renewable energy. If they did not, Ajay Banga said, there was no hope of ending carbon emissions by 2050, as the world’s scientists had repeatedly made clear was necessary to avoid climate catastrophe.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ntries-oil

[raison de arizona]

Well that's just great. Maybe we could have extracted some concessions from them along these lines before tfg sent them all that military hardware.

[raison de arizona]

Breathtaking, and yet another reason to keep tfg from the White House.

Saudi Arabia has threatened to imprison the bankers and consultants it works with if they cooperate with a probe by US lawmakers into the planned merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf

[MN-Skeptic]

Saudi Arabia has threatened to imprison the bankers and consultants it works with if they cooperate with a probe by US lawmakers into the planned merger of the PGA Tour with LIV Golf

Unfortunately the article is behind Bloomberg's paywall.

[RTH10260]

‘They’ve destroyed us because of some tweets’: why has Saudi Arabia targeted these three sisters?
Last week one was sentenced to 11 years, another had to flee the country, a third could be arrested at any moment. And what were Manahel, Maryam and Fawzia al-Otaibi’s ‘crimes’? A few social media posts that outraged Saudi Arabia’s conservatives

Tom Levitt
Tue 7 May 2024 11.00 CEST

In September 2022, Fawzia al-Otaibi was a week into a trip to her home country of Saudi Arabia, staying with a friend near the Bahrain border, when her phone rang. As soon as she heard the male voice on the other end of the line, she realised that returning had been a terrible mistake.

It was a police officer who, in 2019, had tracked her down and fined her for public indecency after she had posted a video on her Snapchat account, showing her dancing in jeans and a baseball cap at a concert in Riyadh. She and her two sisters, Maryam and Manahel, had become targets in a campaign of arrests, threats and intimidation by the Saudi authorities after they had used their popular social media channels to post about women’s rights. For her, the dancing clip wasn’t a political statement; it was just about sharing a happy moment with her followers.

After the fine, Fawzia left Saudi Arabia for Dubai and hadn’t been back to her home country in three years. She thought the authorities had forgotten about her. She was wrong.

“[The police officer] told me that I needed to come to a police station in Riyadh to get some documentation but that everything would be OK,” she says. “He was trying to make me feel comfortable. He said, ‘You are our daughter. There is no need to bring a lawyer – you can just come alone. We just have some questions for you. When you come you will understand.’”

“I just knew I had to flee,” she says. She got into a car and quickly crossed the border into Bahrain. The next day, when the police realised she wasn’t going to show up, she was immediately issued with a travel ban, prohibiting her from leaving the country. Then she received a text message from her lawyer, who was at the police station: “They’ve got Manahel.”

Last week, nearly two years after her escape, Fawzia receieved another message. This time it was to tell her that Manahel had been convicted of terrorism offences by a court in Saudi Arabia, for uploading pictures of herself with her head uncovered, and social media posts supporting women’s rights. She had been sentenced to 11 years in jail.

Fawzia had been preparing herself for what might come – but when the news struck, the “world became dark before my eyes”, she says.

“For the first time, I hated the fact that I was created a woman in my country. A country that had destroyed me and my family, and turned our lives into an unbearable hell for the crime that we are women who want our right to life. It’s a feeling I can’t even describe.”

A few days before she was sentenced, Manahel had managed to speak to her family for the first time in more than four months, after contact had been cut off without explanation.



https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... -al-otaibi