Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salaman (MBS) is set to invest more than $4 billion in a luxury coastal tourism destination called Epicon that will also include residential offerings, well-informed sources revealed.
Situated on the Gulf of Aqaba, Epicon will have two towers, one standing at 225 metres (m) and the other at 275m.
These towers will house a hotel with 41 rooms and luxury residences, as well as 14 suites and apartments.
Meanwhile, an Epicon resort located near the hotel offers 120 rooms and 45 beachfront residential villas.
This huge spending on sportwashing while Saudi Arabia’s unemployment and poverty rate continue to rise, sparks widespread controversy at home and abroad.
Since taking office, MBS has done nothing worthful for the Saudi society but wars and crises. In contrast, Saudi Arabia has witnessed an unprecedented economic and political crisis.
In a failed attempt to cover up his failure, MBS has declared several projects to whitewash his dark reality.
Since 2021, MBS declared a series of fake projects that will never see the light of day.
NEOM, a unit of the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, is talking to a group of mostly local lenders to raise money to help fund the early stages of the $500 billion project, the sources added.
Banks are negotiating terms with NEOM and if agreed upon, the loan could be completed in the next few months.
NEOM is also planning to raise up to 3 billion riyals from local banks to fund the development of Shushah Island, a luxury tourism development, the sources said.
NEOM has earlier signed several deals to bring in investment into the project.
NEOM last month finalized a deal worth more than 21 billion riyals with a group of local investors to develop temporary housing and facilities for 95,000 people under a public-private partnership deal.
Prior to that, it signed a 3 billion riyal loan with Riyadh Bank to fund the development of an island-tourism resort called Sindalah.
MBS’ NEOM was described as a “science fiction” project. A city defined as a wall, driven through an uninhabitable desert, hermetically sealed and reliant solely on technology to make it liveable.
The unconventional megacity is part of MBS’ ambitious NEOM development project, which released conceptual videos showing the city’s high walls enclosing trees, gardens, and other plant life, nestling communities among work and recreational structures.
The NEOM “style catalog” includes elevators that somehow fly through the sky, an urban spaceport, and buildings shaped like a double helix, a falcon’s outstretched wings, and a flower in bloom. There will be swim lanes for commuters and “smart” everything.
MBS has long been criticised for his huge spending on unreal megacities, saying that architecture is often drawn to authoritarian regimes for no other reason than their ability to do things by decree, citing NEOM mega-project as an example.
It is worth mentioning that NEOM offered tax-free salaries of $700,000 to $900,000 for some senior expatriates, more than 20 times the income of the average Saudi, and a broad range of other perks.
NEOM has become something of a full-employment guarantee for international architects, futurists, and even Hollywood production designers, each taking a cut of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum riches in exchange for work that some strongly suspect will never be used and for designs that never see the light of day.
