Excel's Coffee Shop

[basserdan]

Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman plays dangerous game with populist purge

Fears grow that an anti-corruption drive that saw up to 500 arrests could provoke a backlash from the old guard

By Louise Callaghan
Middle East Correspondent
November 12 2017, 12:01am,


Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s crackdown is likely to prove popular with ordinary Saudis but others worry that the new system of rule will be autocratic, unaccountable and destabilising. BANDAR ALGALOUD/GETTY

For the next two months, the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh is fully booked, according to hotel reservation websites. As usual, its guests are wealthy, powerful men used to a lavish lifestyle. But there is one key difference: they are locked inside under armed guard.

In the past week, the £1,000-a-night hotel has become the world’s most exclusive prison: home to billionaires, playboys and princes swept up in an “anti-corruption drive” spearheaded by the crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, that began last Saturday. It aims to recover £76bn in ill-gotten assets.



Critics warn that the arrests, which have seen more than 200 people detained with rumours flying that the figure could be closer to 500 — including some of the country’s most prominent princes — and 1,700 bank accounts frozen, are part of a power grab by the 32-year-old prince, which could set off internal dissent and destabilise the region.

But for many Saudis, it is a welcome sign that the kingdom is cleansing itself of the endemic corruption that has drained its economy and paralysed its politics for decades.

“It sends a clear message that no one is above the law,” said Fahad Nazer, a columnist and consultant to the Saudi embassy in America.

“It says that you can’t abuse or embezzle public funds — that these are serious crimes. There was an expectation that working for the government came with perks. Those days are over.”


Suspects accused of corruption sleep on mattresses at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton

The extraordinary sequence of events that surrounded the purge began last Saturday when King Salman, the crown prince’s elderly father, announced the creation of an anti-corruption body to target the rampant misuse of state funds.

It had already been a turbulent day in the kingdom. That morning, the pro-Saudi Lebanese prime minister had resigned in a broadcast from Riyadh, and a ballistic missile fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen had been intercepted over the city’s airport.

At 10.20 that evening, the corruption body was announced. At the same time, Saudi forces fanned out to track down dozens of the kingdom’s elite.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a playboy best known for his profligate spending and relative social liberalism, was reportedly arrested at his luxury desert encampment — where he spends weekends feasting and watching football amid the dunes. Others were led away from their mansions.

Roads around the Ritz-Carlton were closed off as the detainees were ferried inside and armed guards secured the entrances. Earlier, guests had been hurried away to make room for the prisoners. Early on Sunday, princes with a net worth larger than the GDP of several countries had been consigned to mattresses on the floor of the hotel’s Ballroom B. Their private jets had been grounded.

The hotel is a sumptuously decorated 492-room behemoth, with marble floors and chandeliers the size of a sports car. But most of the detainees would have found their surroundings positively modest.

“Honestly, for them the Ritz-Carlton is a real downgrade,” said a western diplomat formerly based in Riyadh. “Even for princes you or I have never heard of, they live in palaces unlike anything you can imagine.”

Soon, names of the incarcerated started to leak online. For Saudis, many of them represented a who’s who of suspicion — among them men long associated in the rumour mill with the misuse of state funds.

“There’s clearly an element of this which is designed to be theatrical, and to send a message,” said Sir John Jenkins, a former British ambassador to Riyadh and an executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank. “He wanted to show he was serious.”

But the arrested also included Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, the commander of the 100,000-strong National Guard, who had been a significant counterweight to the crown prince’s power. The ousting of this potential rival brought the last of the Saudi security forces under the young crown prince’s control.

Within Saudi Arabia, the purges have been met with overwhelming support from the middle classes, who have long resented the excesses of the royal family, whose numbers run into the thousands. Despite the country’s fabulous wealth, many Saudis struggle to find affordable housing because key tracts of land are bought by royals and held until they have grown in value.

As oil prices have fallen, ordinary Saudis have started to feel the pinch: wages to state employees were cut last year — though later reinstated — and many fear further austerity measures. There are few employment options for educated young people outside a limited supply of routine government jobs.

“This was a hugely popular move,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University who studies Saudi Arabia. “It was a necessary thing. A jolt is necessary, and there will be more.”

Rumours of a clampdown on corruption had begun to circulate in the weeks and months before the arrests. One source close to the government said they knew of at least one person who had been asked to return to Saudi Arabia from abroad in the days prior to the purge. He was later incarcerated.

But the scale of the arrests took the country by surprise. Analysts and sources close to the Saudi government say the purges are far from over.

“The idea is to send a strong message to elites that the old era is over,” said Ali Shihabi, executive director of the Arabia Foundation, a think tank with close links to the kingdom. “What they’re going to do is negotiate with people to pay back ill-gotten wealth . . . involuntary philanthropy if you like.”

It remains unclear how the state would reclaim assets held in western banks — or those tied up in fine art hung in their Belgravia mansions.

For some, the allegations of corruption from a multibillionaire leader of an autocratic oil dynasty were hard to stomach. Saudi Arabia is a state controlled and largely owned by one extended family, of which the crown prince is a key part. “These people [who have been arrested] are well associated in the public eye with corruption issues,” said Graham Griffiths, a senior analyst at consultancy Control Risks. “But in many ways they’re no different from other members of the economic elite and royal family.”

In a statement broadcast this year, the crown prince had spoken of his desire to drastically reform the kingdom. For the first time in recent history, a Saudi leader was taking on the sclerotic system of consensus-based governance within the extended royal family — replacing it with a more direct political model.

The prince, analysts say, knows his public better than any other Saudi leader. He is also more ambitious. This year, he pushed past his cousin Mohammad bin Nayef — a veteran security chief known as American’s favourite Saudi — to become crown prince. He promptly eased up on the medieval restrictions on women and pledged to lead Saudi Arabia away from its dependence on oil: encouraging tourism and growth of the technology sector.

Amid the headline-grabbing and the semi-liberal rhetoric, however, lies a darker edge, which many fear could destabilise the kingdom, throwing the region into chaos.

Much as President Vladimir Putin clamped down on the oligarchs in the 2000s, analysts said the prince was asserting his control over the system by cleansing it. But there are other potential parallels to Putin. As the public cheered the arrests, fears began to rise over the nature of this new system: streamlined, more efficient, but decidedly autocratic.

“This is what opaque, unaccountable, monarchic rule looks like,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank. “The way this was done is not a way that gives any transparency. If you’re another senior prince or another senior businessman, you don’t know what you can do to avoid a similar fate.”

A diplomat said: “People are very anxious. They don’t know who will be next. He’s done it now: the question is whether he has bitten off more than he can chew. No one knows yet.”

Allison Wood, also a Middle East consultant for Control Risks, said Mohammad wanted to be “prince of a new generation”. “What will be critical with all of this is whether he can convince everyone that this is a real change in the way the business environment is run,” she added.

The crown prince, who is keen that the arrests do not alarm the international business community, has pledged that the accused will face a fair and transparent legal process. On Thursday, 56 judges were appointed or promoted by the king.

Significantly, the cases will be handled by the public prosecutor rather than in sharia religious courts.

The reforms have already riled Saudi’s powerful clerical establishment, and the royals who support them. Though there is no public opinion polling in the kingdom, it is clear that for all the modernising rhetoric, there is a large section of Saudi society that fanatically opposes the country’s liberalisation.

“He has made some very bad people very angry,” said a diplomat. “We just need to hope that he can handle it.”

Though the Saudi religious establishment defers to the royal family, it commands a lot of support within Riyadh’s centres of power.

Since the foundation of the Al Saud dynasty in the 18th century, the family has ruled alongside the clerics, whose support underpins its claim to rule and enforces the kingdom’s ultra-strict interpretation of Islam.

Even in the 21st century, the religious establishment holds immense power: sending moral enforcers onto the streets to chastise women and using government funds to promote its illiberal Wahhabi Islam abroad. But over time, its influence has been eroded. Now dozens of hardline clerics have been arrested, and many more fear detention.

As the purge continues, the challenge facing the young crown prince is to complete his reach for power without risking insurrection from the old guard. Some see him taking the crown very soon.

“I would say that we will see an abdication within six months,” said Michael Stephens, a Middle East research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “He will become king. It’s a question of when his father is handing the keys over.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/saudi-crown-prince-mohammad-bin-salman-plays-dangerous-game-with-populist-purge-qstlm8zf5