Economic national and international reports doubted the credibility of MBS’s report on the city of Neom and its goal the reports of the establishment of the city, the goals, and the possibility of achieving it.
Surprisingly, in 2017 MBS announced a campaign to fight corruption at all levels of state administration, despite many reports that revealed different forms of corruption in the NEOM project.
The government of Saudi Arabia announced the issuance of a set of exceptional laws for the city of Neom only, including the exemption of taxes, customs, and labor laws, as well as abolishing all legal restrictions imposed on business in the Neom project. It also announced funding the project with half a trillion dollars by the sovereign funds until the end of the first phase ending in 2025 and until the project starts bringing profits to end in 2025, which means that the first phase was not completed by the time MBX announced during the launching of the project.
According to analysts, the disregard of the sovereign fund to the crisis of increasing debt on the Kingdom is a form of corruption that began as MBS assumed the mandate of the Covenant, and his vision 2030.
Official reports from the Saudi Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank showed the Kingdom’s rising debts due to the collapse of Oil prices to 861%, after the kingdom’s debt reached $ 113.3 billion in October of 2017 compared to 2014 when it was $ 11.8 billion at the time.
The Sovereign Fund, which is supposed to provide the project with half a trillion dollars, manages a budget of $238 billion, which means the privatization of investment ratios of Aramco in order to bring insufficient funds to support the NEOM project.
Moreover, international reports revealed the involvement of the CEO of Neom, Klaus Kleinfeld, in a lot of corruption. The New York Times revealed that Kleinfeldt resigned from his position as a CEO of “Siemens” in 2007 after being accused of corruption, which included paying bribes for more than one billion euros in order to conclude some deals. This was the largest corruption operation in the history of the German electronic company. This resulted in the company being fined millions of dollars and for Klaus to resign from his post.
According to Transparency International, the countries for which the bribes were paid are Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, China, Russia, Argentina, Israel, and Venezuela.
Corruption scandals for the man chosen by MBS are many, including the case of the American company Alcoa, which paid bribes to officials in Bahrain, in order to supply aluminum to Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) over the past decade.
Klaus was appointed by MBS as an honorary member of the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an honorary senator for the Lindau Nobel Prize Laureates Meeting, and he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
And the question is: if MBS declared combating corruption, why did he exclude NEOM corruption which impacts the kingdom’s economy.
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