Saudi Arabia freed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and several of the kingdom’s most prominent businessmen from detention, clearing out the Ritz-Carlton hotel that served as a jail for the country’s elite during a controversial crackdown on corruption.
Prince Alwaleed, the billionaire chairman of Riyadh’s Kingdom Holding Co who owns stakes in Citigroup and Twitter, on Saturday returned home after reaching a settlement with authorities, a senior government official said on condition of anonymity.
He will remain at the helm of his company, the official said, declining to provide the other terms of the deal.
Waleed al-Ibrahim, head of a major media firm, and retail billionaire Fawaz Al Hokair were also freed after agreeing to deals, another government official said.
The prince’s release came just hours after Alwaleed told Reuters reporters in an interview that he expected to go home soon and retain control of his company, calling his detention a “misunderstanding” and expressing support for the kingdom’s rulers.
With the suspects’ names and evidence against them never officially disclosed, the detentions raised concerns about transparency among foreign investors, who are vital to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to diversify the economy away from oil.
The departures from the hotel mark the end of the first phase of Prince Mohammed’s anti-corruption campaign, which shook the kingdom when it was launched in November. Hundreds of suspects were arrested, including some of the country’s richest men and its top economic policymaker.
Officials have said the government expects to reap more than US$100 billion from settlements with detainees in exchange for their freedom. Others have been transferred to prison to face trial, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Also released after agreeing to settlements were Khalid al-Tuwaijri, head of the royal court under the late Saudi King Abdullah, and Prince Turki bin Nasser, who was involved in a massive arms sale that led to corruption probes in the UK and the US, one of the government officials said.
Several of those released from detention earlier appear to have returned to their lives as usual. Among them is former finance minister and minister of state Ibrahim al-Assaf, who led Saudi Arabia’s delegation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“If they can just go back to their old jobs, it would appear that the campaign was just a warning signal and an effort to raise money,” said Gregory Gause, a professor of international affairs and Saudi Arabia specialist at Texas A&M University. “If that is all that it was, I wonder if anything will change.”
The identities of the detainees and some of the allegations against them were leaked to media, but few details have been provided on their cases or on the settlements many have reached since then.
The allegations against Prince Alwaleed were never formally made public, although a senior official told reporters at the time of his detention that he was accused of money laundering, bribery and extortion.
Alwaleed maintained his innocence in his interview with Reuters, saying that all his dealings had been appropriate and that it was “very important to come out of this clean and pure.”
The senior official said he could not confirm or deny if the prince had been found innocent.
“Settlements don’t happen unless the accused acknowledges violations, and documents that in writing and pledges that he won’t repeat them,” the official said. “This is the general principle of all who were detained in corruption cases recently and not only Alwaleed bin Talal.”
The purge has pleased some Saudi Arabians by showing that Prince Mohammed’s economic shake-up is affecting the wealthy as well as the poor, said Tom Coghlan, director for the Middle East and North Africa at K2 Intelligence in London.
However, observers should not “underestimate the anger among the Saudi elite,” Coghlan said. “There is a significant flight-of-capital risk.”
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS