At the time of Saudi Arabia’s investment of $33 billion with SoftBank’s Vision Group, SoftBank announced that the Vision Group had invested in 88 and that Bin Salman’s investments would be in 30 companies, from which 15 companies are expected to profit, and 15 other companies to go bankrupt, due to the major economic shocks it experienced, after the Kingdom’s investment was pumped into it, therefore, the Kingdom’s bet on the economic vision announced by SoftBank was a catastrophic bet, as it was like a terrible collision, despite what some SoftBank experts said that the damage to the kingdom will not be serious and that one of the profitable companies will compensate for the potential losses, like Uber, in which SoftBank invested.
Given the value injected to invest with SoftBank, 21 billion dollars was injected into profitable companies, and the value of 12 billion dollars was invested in companies that went bankrupt, which means that a third of the Kingdom’s investments with SoftBank has been lost.
The 21 billion dollars that were invested in the profitable companies achieved a return of 7% per year, however, the stages of disbursing those profits, nor how Saudi Arabia’s treasury obtained these dividend payments were clear. This prompted specialists in the field who accuse the Kingdom’s government of having covert dealings with the bank, and they accuse MBS of obtaining the profits of money invested in profitable companies, without returning them to state coffers, or returning them to the Kingdom’s Sovereign Investment Fund, from which 33 billion dollars were taken.
The deterioration of the investments made by SoftBank was due to several crises, the most important of which was Covid 19, with which the dreamy vision of investment with SoftBank began to change, so the Kingdom’s government took the initiative to cancel the investment in the second financial portfolio, and did not disclose any information regarding the amount that was invested In the first financial portfolio, nor the returns is achieved by investing the 33 billion dollars.
Investment experts believed that SoftBank has extensive experience in the field of investment, and this was rather a temporary crisis, which unfortunately MBS invested in.
It is clear that bin Salman is inexperienced with illogical thinking. Everything he did has failed, and the examples are many, including Khashoggi’s murder, which exposed his criminality, and the NEOM project, which exposed his illogical thinking, and the failure of his economic vision, and most recently The Line project, which he tampered with people’s dreams about it, and it was nothing but an illusion.
MBS’s failure is not linked to his person, but rather has a magical impact on all projects and institutions that he deals with, or invests in, and SoftBank is the best evidence.
