FUTURE SAUDI KING TIGHTENS GRIP ON POWER
Ordinary citizens praise anti-corruption crackdown as long-awaited
RIYADH
SAUDI Arabia’s future king has tightened his grip on power through an anti-corruption purge by arresting royals, ministers and investors, including billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, who is one of the kingdom’s most prominent businessmen.
Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of the king and owner of investment firm Kingdom Holding, invests in firms, such as Citigroup and Twitter. He was among 11 princes, four ministers and tens of former ministers detained, three senior officials said on Sunday.
The purge against the kingdom’s political and business elite also targeted the head of the National Guard, Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, who was detained and replaced as minister of the powerful National Guard by Prince Khaled bin Ayyaf.
The allegations against Prince Alwaleed included money laundering, bribery and extorting officials, one official said, while Prince Miteb was accused of embezzlement, hiring ghost employees and awarding contracts to his own companies, including a US$10 billion (RM42 billion) deal for walkie talkies and bulletproof military gear worth billions of Saudi riyals.
News of the purge came soon after King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud decreed late on Saturday the creation of an anti-corruption committee chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his 32-year-old favourite son, who had amassed power since rising from obscurity three years ago.
MbS, as he is known, was expected to follow at least by removing Prince Miteb from leadership of the National Guard, a pivotal power base rooted in the kingdom’s tribes.
Analysts said the purge aimed to go beyond corruption and aimed to remove potential opposition to Prince Mohammed’s ambitious reform agenda, which was widely popular with Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning youth population.
The most recent crackdown broke with the tradition of consensus within the ruling family, wrote James Dorsey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
“P r i n c e M ohammed, rather than forging alliances, is extending his iron grip to the ruling family, the military, and the National Guard to counter what appears to be more widespread opposition within the family as well as the military to his reforms and the Yemen war,” he said.
Scholar Joseph Kechichian said the interests of the Al Saud, however, would remain protected.
Many ordinary Saudis praised the crackdown as long-awaited.
A Saudi official said former Riyadh governor Prince Turki bin Abdullah was detained on accusations of corruption in the Riyadh Metro project and taking advantage of his influence to award contracts to his own companies.
Former finance minister Ibrahim al-Assaf, a board member of national oil giant Saudi Aramco, was also detained, accused of embezzlement related to the expansion of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, and taking advantage of his position and inside information to buy lands, the official added.
Other detainees included ousted economy minister Adel Fakieh, who once played a major role in drafting MbS’s reforms, and Khalid al-Tuwaijiri, who headed the Royal Court under the late King Abdullah.
People on Twitter applauded the arrests of certain ministers, with some comparing them to “the night of the long knives”, a violent purge of political leaders in Nazi Germany in 1934.
Bakr bin Laden, chairman of the big Saudi Binladin construction group, and Alwaleed alIbrahim, owner of the MBC television network, were also detained.
At least some of the detainees were held at the opulent RitzCarlton hotel in the diplomatic quarter here, said sources in contact with the government and guests whose plans had been disrupted.
Prince Alwaleed, a flamboyant character, had sometimes used his prominence as an investor to aim barbs at the kingdom’s rulers.
In December 2015, he called then-United States presidential candidate Donald Trump a “disgrace to all America” and demanded on Twitter that he withdraw from the election.
Trump responded by tweeting: “Dopey Prince @Alwaleed_Talal wants to control our US politicians with daddy’s money. Can’t do it when I get elected.”
His father, Prince Talal, was considered one of the most vocal supporters of reform in the ruling Al Saud family, having pressed for a constitutional monarchy decades ago. Reuters