Well-informed sources revealed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) has been taking large amount of money from the Saudi Public Investment Fund in uncontrolled way.
Over the past two months, MBS took $100 million from the Public Investment Fund without any legal basis, the sources added.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced last year that it had secured a new $17 billion seven-year senior unsecured term loan, according to a statement.
The loan is the largest-of-its-kind general corporate purpose loan worldwide and was twice oversubscribed.
The borrowing of Saudi Arabia's $620 billion Wealth Fund comes even as the state faces a surplus due to high oil prices.
In 2022, Saudi Arabia's PIF reported an $11 billion investment loss.
Headed by MBS, the PIF did not report such a loss in its accounts for 2022, the year in which the same index fell by nearly 20 percent.
The Saudi PIF has recently made headlines after announcing a deal to merge the LIV golf tournament with the PGA Tour, as part of MBS's sportwashing policies.
At home, the PIF supports large projects supervised by MBS, such as the $500 billion NEOM project and the Qiddiya entertainment city.
Abroad, the PIF owns stakes in major international companies, including a stake of $8.9 billion in the electric carmaker Lucid, which incurred losses following MBS's partnership deal, and another stake of $3.2 billion in the video game company Activision Blizzard.
However, the PIF was subjected to severe blows and successive losses.
Lucid Group Inc stock is down 66% over the past year and gets a Bearish rating from Investors Observer Sentiment Indicator.
This came shortly after PIF held nearly 65% of Lucid's common stock.
Sources familiar with the matter said that MBS is really furious over the decline, especially after he recently decided to increase its Lucid stake by 9.2% to 1.11 billion shares.
Experts have warned that the sharp decline in foreign investments by 85% in just one year is a real disaster that proves that foreign investors do not trust the projects launched by the Crown Prince.
Efforts to attract inward investment have been hampered by the clampdown on senior business executives and other figures in 2017 – billed by the authorities as an anti-corruption drive.
This huge spending on sportwashing while Saudi Arabia's unemployment and poverty rate continue to rise, sparks widespread controversy at home and abroad.
