Saudi Arabia

[WHL]

Was it only a few months ago that the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, was in London having his Bum kissed by all and sundry , taking Tea and cakes with the queen at Buck house, this murderous little thug, had spent millions on adverts all over London, telling the world that Saudi was changing, a new chapter was beginning in his kingdom, fast forward a few months, a journalist enters the Saudi Embassy in turkey and disappears..his jets still bomb innocents in Yemen, jails women rights supporters, cuts people's limbs off etc etc,

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 75671.html

[Lofos-5]

Certainly a troubling development. I doubt that the US will change its stance though with the current man on seat.

https://apnews.com/df30df73446b4455b5720114399ca1a8

Luckily a good number of organisations and speakers have now pulled out from the "Davos in the desert" event that will start soon.

A.

[Jimgward]

They spend loads of money with UK and US on arms etc. This gives them leeway other countries wouldn’t get

[tonee]

And where was all the demonstrations as per Trump? Hmm.

[WHL]

I got a feeling that, no matter how much evidence they get, the Saudi oil money will win.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... spect.html

[WHL]

The Money they get from oil, pays for the Billions spent by them for weapons from the UK/USA, already that twit Trump is backtracking,he tweeted '' just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate'' saying he doesn't want to jeopardize Saudi Arabia's shopping habits...as I said the Oil money wins every time.
Whats it matter if a journalist is butchered in an Embassy and he is taken away in pieces, the Saudis butcher their own every day of the week back home.

[Jimgward]

Boris says “if we don’t supply them with missiles and jets and bombs, someone else will...”

Says it all. Money rules. To hell with consequences.

However, rather typical that we all get our knickers in a twist over one person with a story and face, over hundreds of thousands killed in Yemen.

[WHL]

Boris says “if we don’t supply them with missiles and jets and bombs, someone else will...”

Says it all. Money rules. To hell with consequences.

However, rather typical that we all get our knickers in a twist over one person with a story and face, over hundreds of thousands killed in Yemen.

Where are all the people on here, who where rightly slagging off Putin for getting rid of his rivals? the silence from them is deafening ...

[Varky]

Seems there are no morals in politics any more. Not sure there were any before, but it is clear that there are none now.

[Jimgward]

You may be interested in this article Jim, yes from the Sun no less.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2395690/y ... bels-iran/

It is interesting, but what aspect are you referring to?

[WHL]

Ooops
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/saudi- ... ort-138007

[WHL]

Don't know whether to laugh or cry.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -dead.html

[Lofos-5]

Oil and arms are only part of the story - the US has surpassed Saudi and Russia to become the largest oil producer. Arms/jobs will hurt, yes. Another main reason is KSA's fight against terrorism in the region and it's hard stance towards Iran (which Trump is far less easy about than the previous administration).

This is the latest view from the Economist, one really wonders how much longer the young MBS is still tenable...:

SAUDI ARABIA has finally admitted what much of the world has known for weeks: Jamal Khashoggi is dead. A critical journalist in self-imposed exile, Mr Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month and was not seen again. The Saudis insisted he left safely and impugned anyone who said otherwise—until October 19th, when the kingdom finally admitted his death in a late-night statement. But it was not murder, or even an attempted abduction gone bad, the Saudis claimed. Instead they spun it as a sort of diplomatic bar fight. Mr Khashoggi had a “discussion” with unnamed men inside the consulate, which “led to a brawl” and ultimately his death.

After so much dissembling, anything the Saudis say should be treated with deep suspicion. This cover story, which they had two and a half weeks to prepare, is brazen in its absurdity. It requires believing that a 59-year-old went to get paperwork for his upcoming wedding and picked a fight with a large group of men. It does not explain why those men were inside the consulate in the first place. Turkish investigators have released the names and photos of 15 Saudis flown to Istanbul on private jets hours before Mr Khashoggi entered the mission. They included spies, special-forces officers and a coroner. This was a remarkably well-organised accident. The official statement also ignores a final, macabre question: the fate of Mr Khashoggi’s body.

Eighteen Saudis have been arrested, and five senior officials sacked. One was Ahmed al-Assiri, a deputy intelligence chief rumoured for days to be a possible scapegoat. More significant is the sacking of Saud al-Qahtani, the belligerent media adviser to the powerful crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman. Little known outside the region, Mr Qahtani looms large in the Gulf, using social media to launch acerbic attacks on critics. He kept a blacklist of troublesome journalists and marshalled an electronic army of Twitter trolls that Saudi dissidents dubbed “the flies”.

Both men are close to Prince Muhammad. They are not known as freelancers. “I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of the king and the crown prince,” Mr Qahtani tweeted last year. Saudi officials insist that Prince Muhammad knew nothing about the plot against Mr Khashoggi. Either they are lying or Prince Muhammad has no control over his closest aides. Neither scenario is reassuring. Yet it looks as if the plan is for the crown prince to escape any blame for what happened in Istanbul. Alongside the sackings, King Salman appointed a committee of ministers to overhaul the Saudi intelligence apparatus. It will be chaired by Prince Muhammad.

Saudi Arabia’s immediate goal is to ensure that this episode does not ruin its relationship with President Donald Trump, who seems willing to accept the cover story. He called the Saudi investigation credible and “a very important first step”. He also warned lawmakers not to sanction Saudi Arabia by cutting off arms deals. But both Democrats and Republicans continue to criticise the kingdom. “To say that I am sceptical of the new Saudi narrative about Mr Khashoggi is an understatement,” said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator and Trump ally. Earlier in the week Mr Graham called for Prince Muhammad’s removal.

The kingdom may have clout in Washington, but it is not Israel, a country with a deep reservoir of popular support. A recent survey by The Economist and YouGov, a pollster, found that just 4% of Americans view Saudi Arabia as an ally. Lawmakers have already called for sanctions on Saudi officials found culpable in the murder. Republicans will not suffer politically for bucking the president on this issue.

Turkey has played an astute game, leaking details to the media but withholding the most damning evidence it claims to possess: audio and video recordings of Mr Khashoggi’s murder. If it released the tapes, or even played them for a select audience, the subsequent outrage would be hard for Mr Trump to ignore. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, may wish to trade his trump card for Saudi investment—or use it to undermine the Saudis’ position in the region.

Prince Muhammad is 33 and hopes to rule for decades. Despite other ruinous policies, such as the war in Yemen and the blockade of Qatar, he built a reputation as a forward-looking reformer. Mr Khashoggi’s death seems to have shattered that image. Instead his defenders are falling back on a more traditional defence. “The wider region is on a knife’s edge,” says Ali Shihabi of the Arabia Foundation, a pro-Saudi think-tank in Washington, DC. “It would be insane to do anything that puts such stability at risk.” Generations of Arab autocrats used that argument to persuade the West to overlook their abuses. In the end, all of them left the region less stable than they found it.

[Lofos-5]

Another interesting piece, same source:

Saudi Arabia’s alliances are being tested as never before

The death of Jamal Khashoggi has besmirched the kingdom’s reputation




WHEN AMERICA’S secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, met Saudi officials in Riyadh on October 16th, they smiled, posed for photographs and talked about jet lag. They did not dwell on the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly carved up with a bone saw. Two weeks earlier Mr Khashoggi, who lived in self-imposed exile, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and disappeared. After days of dissembling, the Saudis have dropped the pretence that he left the building that same afternoon. Few doubt that he is dead or that his fellow citizens killed him. The question is what the West ought to do about it.

To judge by Mr Pompeo’s jovial demeanour in Riyadh, both the American and Saudi governments want the issue to go away. He grinned through a meeting with the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, and praised the Saudis for their pledge to investigate. His boss, President Donald Trump, has repeated denials from both the king and crown prince. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” said Mr Trump.

The Saudis may yet be forced by the copious evidence against them to admit some measure of guilt, perhaps calling Mr Khashoggi’s death an abduction gone bad. If so, they will need to explain why one of the men flown to Istanbul for the operation was a forensic expert—unnecessary for a rendition, but handy if you plan to dismember a corpse. In shielding Prince Muhammad from blame, they may pin the debacle on “rogue” officers. This would beggar belief. The prince has amassed more power than any past Saudi ruler and has a firm grip on the security services.

Death and denial

Still, Mr Trump may choose to accept this dubious story. He is counting on the Saudis to hold oil prices steady next month by maintaining global supply, as America hits Iran, their shared enemy, with new sanctions that aim to cut off its oil exports. He also sees the kingdom as an important market for American weapons manufacturers. Mr Trump still crows about a $110bn arms deal he made last year. That number is inflated, but he seems to believe it and is loth to jeopardise future deals. Lurking in the background is Russia. A Saudi journalist close to Prince Muhammad has warned that, if Mr Trump abandons the kingdom, Saudi Arabia could turn to Vladimir Putin.

Turkey is making a whitewash more difficult. Its investigators have plied the media with details of the alleged murder, including descriptions of a supposed audio recording of Mr Khashoggi’s horrific last moments. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his ministers tread more carefully. None has publicly accused the Saudis of wrongdoing. Officials in Ankara are reluctant to confront the kingdom alone and want to secure American support before corroborating their claims. Any hard evidence of Mr Khashoggi’s murder gives them great leverage—perhaps to extract Saudi investment in their ailing economy.

Even if Saudi Arabia gets through this episode without a rupture, it has done incalculable damage to its reputation. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are furious. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator and Trump ally, has long supported close ties with the kingdom. But on October 16th he went on “Fox and Friends” (Mr Trump’s favourite programme) and called Prince Muhammad “a wrecking ball”, adding: “He has got to go” and “I’m gonna sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia.” Lawmakers have already invoked the Magnitsky act, which could impose sanctions on anyone found culpable for Mr Khashoggi’s death.

America, especially under Mr Trump, has been willing to work with brutal autocrats. Unreliable autocrats may be a different matter. Prince Muhammad has a record of impulsive behaviour, from the blockade of Qatar to the abduction of Lebanon’s prime minister. His war in Yemen has turned into a lethal quagmire. The disappearance of Mr Khashoggi brings that record into sharper focus. Meanwhile, some in Washington believe that since the kingdom is no longer the world’s largest oil producer, thanks to American fracking, it need no longer be treated with kid gloves.

Prince Muhammad never promised to make Saudi Arabia a liberal democracy. He offered his subjects a deal: accept my rule in exchange for social liberalisation and economic modernisation. But the crown prince cannot hold up his end of the bargain if he turns the kingdom into a pariah. Many big firms have already withdrawn from an investment conference in Riyadh scheduled for October 23rd. Some royals wonder if he will end up bringing down the whole regime.

The monarch can change the crown prince. He has already done so twice. But King Salman is 82 and ailing. His moments of lucidity are said to be dwindling, and his son controls access, even reportedly putting his mother under house arrest to keep her from advising her husband. Some hope a family council might choose a new heir. Its members would be hard-pressed to convene inside the kingdom. Many of the prince’s siblings now quietly spend more time abroad. “To see people from [the royal family] living as refugees, it’s a shock,” says a royal from a neighbouring Gulf country.

Prince Muhammad has neutralised the clerical establishment, the National Guard and other centres of power. He would be difficult to dislodge. “I fear the day I die I am going to die without accomplishing what I have in my mind,” he once said in an interview. The man who pledged to create a new Saudi Arabia may end up like so many Arab autocrats before him, putting his own position before that of his country.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "The kingdom and the cover-up"

[Lofos-5]

... and what about this?

Reasons for firms to steer clear of Saudi Arabia

The palace interferes in all aspects of Saudi life, including business



IT IS EASY to forget how new Saudi Arabia is to the modern world. The man who founded the kingdom in 1932, Ibn Saud, is said in his early days to have carried his land’s entire treasury in the saddle bag of a camel. When Americans struck oil in 1938, Ali al-Naimi, who almost 60 years later would become the world’s most influential oil minister, was a shoeless urchin tending lambs in the desert.

Companies hoping to do business with Saudi Arabia have often tripped up on these shallow roots. Seduced by its vast oil wealth, and impressed with American-educated ministers speaking perfect English, they find to their dismay that the palace and its robed courtiers still call almost all the shots. But they still never expected to face such medieval horror as the presumed killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, regime critic and Washington Post columnist, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2nd.

The kingdom’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Prince Muhammad bin Salman, and his champion, President Donald Trump, are attempting to play down Mr Khashoggi’s disappearance. But for businessmen and bankers who have flocked to pay homage to the 33-year-old Prince Muhammad ever since, in 2016, he set out his “Vision 2030” to modernise the economy, the optics are dreadful. His desire to sell a stake in Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, valuing it at $2trn, in order to raise a whopping investment fund to diversify the economy away from oil, seduced some of the planet’s biggest dealmakers. Now they have no choice but to consider the reputational risk of associating with a regime that not only may have blood on its hands in Istanbul, but is also waging a war in Yemen that has caused a humanitarian crisis.

Vision or mirage?

In fact, they can signal their revulsion over the fate of Mr Khashoggi at relatively little cost. Saudi Arabia, for all of its oil wealth and with the exception of the arms industry, is not as important to Western companies as it thinks it is. The kingdom may have convinced Mr Trump, who made his first overseas visit there as president, that it is a bulwark against Iranian expansion in the Middle East and a force for moderate Islam. But in business terms, besides being the ringleader of OPEC, the oil bloc, Saudi Arabia remains insignificant. Foreign direct investment averaged $5.7bn a year in the past three years; that is about the same as went into Kazakhstan. Since 2015, the Saudis have paid investment banks just one-seventh of what the latter have earned in the Middle East overall, according to Dealogic, a data provider.

As a result, it did not take long, in response the Khashoggi affair, for the heads of some of Saudi Arabia’s biggest foreign business partners to pull out of an investment conference, nicknamed Davos in the desert, to be held next week in Riyadh. They include Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, which has been the kingdom’s banker for more than 80 years; John Flint, head of HSBC; and Stephen Schwarzman, boss of Blackstone, a private-equity firm which has been promised up to $20bn in Saudi cash for a big investment fund. Dara Khosrowshahi, boss of Uber, a ride-hailing firm that received $3.5bn in Saudi investment in 2016, also pulled out. (So did the editor of this newspaper.)

The first Davos in the desert, a year ago, was Prince Muhammad’s coming-out party. It attracted 3,500 business, financial and political bigwigs, and then left a bad taste in the mouth when less than two weeks later he locked up a coterie of Saudi princes and businessmen in the same Ritz Carlton hotel where the foreigners had stayed. This year, the promised Aramco initial public offering has gone awry, chiefly because of mismanagement by the palace. Instead, the oil company may need to borrow as much as $50bn on global markets to fund its acquisition of a stake in Sabic, the state petrochemicals company. The sale of this stake is the new route for funding Prince Muhammad’s investment ambitions.

He is known not to forget a slight; just ask Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign minister, who incurred his wrath after a relatively routine tweet about human-rights abuses in the kingdom. But Aramco’s need to borrow money means that he may now need the world’s bankers more than they need him. And they have safety in numbers. The more people who pull out of next week’s conference, the less risk that any of them can be blackballed individually.

For sure, some businesses have more to lose if Prince Muhammad’s reputation deteriorates further. The $100bn Vision Fund of Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank, a Japanese telecoms and internet firm, took $45bn of the kingdom’s cash in 2016, ploughing it into young tech businesses, including Uber. Mr Son has said nothing about the Khashoggi affair. Nor have defence firms such as America’s Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Britain’s BAE Systems, which are presumably counting on orders from Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest weapons importer. Two giants, ExxonMobil and Dow, have chemical investments with Aramco, which they can plausibly argue is a firm operated by world-class technocrats at arm’s length from the palace. American social media, led by sites such as YouTube and Facebook, have flourished in the kingdom. But though Prince Muhammad cherishes photo ops with tech royalty such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin, the region generates only skimpy revenues for Big Tech. Retailers are also drawn to Saudi Arabia’s youthful population.

Perhaps the biggest risk companies face in doing business with Saudi Arabia is from America’s Congress. Repulsed by the latest incident, on top of the war in Yemen, even senior Republicans are threatening to impose sanctions on the kingdom and curbs on future arms sales, if Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for the suspected killing of Mr Khashoggi is proven. But business has rather little to lose from signalling its disgust over the Khashoggi affair. As long as the palace thinks it can interfere with impunity in every aspect of life in the kingdom and among its subjects, it is not a safe place to be. That is why few foreign firms dug in deep in the first place.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "The Saudi sand trap"

[Devil]

Lofos: why don't you conduct a survey of the number of members here who have read all your republished diatribes from beginning to end? I'll start for you with 1 vote, not read all.

[PhotoLady]

Well first of all the Saudi's claim this person left the building...
A day or so ago, there were claims not only did he not leave the building - he didn't leave it in one piece either.
The men in charge of the task of doing away with said man were told to turn their music up loud on their earphones to drown out the noise of him screaming, while they dismembered his body.
The claim is someone, somewhere has the recording of the sound and how long it took him to die. Around 7 minutes or so, if I recall correctly....
Then the Saudi's said he was killed in a fight. Hmmm
More is coming to light at the moment:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45926754

[Jimgward]

Just realised that Saudi Arabian representative heads the United Nations Human Rights Panel......


Anger after Saudi Arabia 'chosen to head key UN human rights panel'
Wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi says move amounts to "a green light to flog him"

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 09716.html

[WHL]

Disgusting evil regime, but nothing will change the West will still, kiss their Arse,

[WHL]

I have a feeling Tayyip Erdoğan knows more than he's letting on. Said he'd spill the beans today, but didn't actually tell us anything we didn't already know. I suspect he's using what he knows to blackmail Saudi Arabia.

Erdogan wants to diminish Saudi Arabia's, influence in the region and take over as the Muslim worlds leader, he has already set up a military base next to Saudi..... it will all end in tears.