FREEDOM OF ARRESTED SAUDI BILLIONAIRE PRINCE BIN TALAL’S PRICED AT $6 BILLION

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Incarcerated for almost two months in a gilded cage in Riyadh’s luxurious Ritz Carlton Hotel, Saudi billionaire businessman Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal appears to be putting up a fight that could challenge Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assertion that his two month-old purge of scores of members of the ruling family, senior officials, and businessmen constitutes a campaign against corruption.

By CALLUM PATON - Newsweek After weeks of deafening silence surrounding the fate of Saudi Arabia’s richest man, Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal, arrested last month in an anti-corruption purge, it has emerged authorities in the Gulf monarchy are seeking at least $6 billion for his release. The 62-year-old head of the Kingdom Holding Co. was rounded up with dozens of Saudi government officials and ten other members of the kingdom’s royal family as part of a probe spearheaded by the heir-apparent to the gulf monarchy, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. While Prince Salman has consistently defended the detention of senior officials as part of a much-needed crackdown on graft, he has been criticized for what detractors have characterized as a thinly veiled power grab. Prince Bin Talal, who had eschewed an official position in the Saudi government and preferred to focus on his own companies and high-profile projects, had in the past exerted a soft power on world business leaders comparable to that of Bin Salman and his father King Salman.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the $6 billion being sought by Saudi officials is among the highest figures they have demanded for those arrested. At the end of November Prince Mutaib Bin Abdullah, the son of the late King Abdullah, a former head of Saudi Arabia’s national guard and a previous frontrunner to the throne was released for a price of $1 billion. Forbes has estimated Prince Bin Talal’s fortune at $18.7 billion, but the prince has reportedly indicated that handing over $6 billion would amount to an admission of guilt, requiring him to dismantle the financial empire that has been his life’s work. Instead, the billionaire businessman may release a large part of his conglomerate, the Kingdom Holding Co. The company’s market value stands at $8.7 billion, although its worth has fallen by some 14 percent following Prince Bin Talal’s arrest. The prince has indicated that he is willing to fight the allegations made against him in court if he has to. “He wants a proper investigation. It is expected that al-Waleed will give [Prince Bin Salman] a hard time,” a person familiar with the matter said. In a rare interview, Mohammad Bin Salman told the New York Times at the end of last month that some 10 percent of government funds had been siphoned off by corruption each year since 1980 until today. Roughly $100 billion is set to be recovered in settlements. Bin Salman, whose rise to power has been meteoric following his appointment as Defense Minister in 2015, said about 95 percent of those targeted in the anti-graft sweep had agreed to a settlement. “About one percent,” he added, “are able to prove they are clean and their case is dropped right there. About four percent say they are not corrupt and with their lawyers want to go to court.”

by huffingtonpost.com - By James Dorsey - In resisting Prince Mohammed’s demands, Prince Al-Waleed is challenging an opaque and seemingly arbitrary process in which despite assertions by the government that it has conducted extensive investigations and collected substantial evidence of corruption, bribery, money laundering and extortion, there has been little, if any, discernible due process and no proof publicly presented. Quoting sources close to Prince Al-Waleed, The Wall Street Journal reported that the businessman was demanding a proper investigation and was willing to fight it out in court. “He wants a proper investigation. It is expected that al-Waleed will give MBS a hard time,” the Journal quoted a person close to Prince Al-Waleed as saying. The person was referring to Prince Mohammed by his initials. A court battle would put the government’s assertions of due process to the test and would also shine a spotlight on the integrity of Saudi Arabia’s judicial system. The risk involved in a legal battle is that the charges levelled against Prince Al-Waleed and others were common practice in a kingdom in which there were no well-defined rules governing relationships between members of the ruling family and the government as well as ties between princes and princesses who wielded influence and businessmen. There is little doubt that Prince Mohammed’s purge is popular among significant segments of the population, half of which is classified as low- or middle-income families, that has long resented the elite’s seemingly unbridled perks. Prince Mohammed has so far been shielded against questions of the source of his own wealth and that of his tack of the ruling family. Several immediate relatives of Prince Mohammed were last year identified in the Panama Papers leaked from the files of a law firm in the Central American nation that handled offshore business and transactions by the world’s mega-rich.

Media reports have since suggested that the crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman had spent in recent years $1.25 billion on a $500 million yacht, a $300 million mansion in France, and a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci painting. Prince Mohammed has denied buying the art work that was acquired by a close associate of his allegedly on behalf of the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. Shining the spotlight on the anti-corruption campaign in a legal battle with Prince Al-Waleed would come at a time that the government is unilaterally rewriting the kingdom’s social contract that involved a cradle-to-grave-welfare state in exchange for surrender of political rights and acceptance of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservative and Bedouin moral codes. The government this week paid $533 million into a newly established social welfare fund to help families offset the cost of the imminent introduction of a five-percent value-added tax on goods including food, and services, as well as subsidy cuts that would substantially raise the price of electricity and gasoline. The government was forced earlier this year to reverse a freeze on public sector wage increases and perks and slowdown its austerity program because of anger and frustration expressed on social media.

Labor and Social Development Minister Ali al-Ghafees told the state-run Saudi Press Agency that approximately three million families or 10.6 million beneficiaries had already been paid the maximum relief of 938 Saudi riyals ($250) out of the newly created fund. The government, moreover, this month announced a $19bn stimulus package that includes subsidised loans for house buyers and developers, fee waivers for small businesses and financial support for distressed companies. It also presented its new budget involving record spending in which funding of defense outstrips that of education in a country with a 12.7 percent unemployment rate. A Bank of America Merrill Lynch report predicted last year that youth unemployment could jump from 33.5 to 42 percent by 2030.

Prince Mohammed is banking on continued public support for his economic and social reforms, and on the fact that once the dust has settled foreign investors will forget whatever misgivings they may have had about the lack of due process and absence of rule law in the anti-corruption crackdown. Foreign diplomats in the kingdom noted that the businesses of those detained or penalized continued to operate and that no foreign interests were caught up in the purge. However, to maintain his popularity, Prince Mohammed will have to manage expectations, deliver jobs, continue to massage the pain of austerity and the introduction of a new social contract, and ensure that the public continues to perceive his purge as an anti-corruption campaign in which the high and mighty are no longer above the law. A legal battle with Prince Al-Waleed that publicly puts to the test the government’s assertions could upset the apple cart. That may be the leverage Prince Al-Waleed hopes will work in his favour as he negotiates his settlement from the confines of the Ritz Carlton.

Hariri Points to Imminent Major Political Agreement

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Beirut - Asharq Al-Awsat - Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri pointed to a very wide political agreement that would improve the situation in the country, saying that the only way to move forward was to have the majority of Lebanon’s political components within the government. During a meeting on Thursday with a delegation from Beirut’s associations and social organizations, Hariri said: “There is a major disagreement over regional affairs with some parties in the country, such as Hezbollah. But this does not mean that we are unable to establish a dialogue for the benefit of the country, to secure electricity, water, communications, hospitals, the environment or waste disposal.” The Lebanese premier stressed that the most important factor for the development of the economy was political and security stability. He underlined in this regard the need to commit to the policy of dissociation from regional conflicts “in words and deeds, because Lebanon is no longer able to tolerate to have problems with its friends and brothers, whether in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf.” “We want the best relations with the Kingdom because it has never deceived Lebanon. We will continue this process and I assure you that relations with the Kingdom will be at their best,” he added. Hariri commented on the US president’s decision to declare Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, calling it “unfair to the peace process and to the rights of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and Christians.” “The Lebanese state condemns and rejects this decision,” he affirmed. The Lebanese premier went on to say: “Today, for the first time in years, we see that the Palestinian issue has returned to the forefront, and there is an international, Arab, Islamic and Christian consensus to reject the American decision.”

What Would a Saudi-Iran War Look Like? Don’t look now, but it is already here

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By Michael Knights Best Defense guest columnist - ForeignPolicy - This article represents the opinion of the author-

When asked to address the question of what a Saudi-Iran war would look like, my first instinct is to ask the reader to look around because it is already happening. As the futurist William Gibson noted, “the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Already, Saudi Arabia and Iran are killing each other’s proxies, and indirectly are killing each other’s advisors and troops, in Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia’s Shiite Eastern Province. The future is likely to look similar. The existing pattern will intensify, eventually spill over in a short, sharp direct clash, and then sink back down again to the level of proxy wars in other people’s territories. The preferred method of conflict between these states has for a long time been proxy warfare. Since its devastating eight-year war against Iraq, the leadership in Tehran has demonstrated a strong preference for acting through proxies like Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite militias, and Hamas. Lacking a strong military for most of its existence, the state of Saudi Arabia has likewise used proxy warfare to strike painful blows against its enemies, notably against Egypt’s occupation forces in the 1962-1970 Yemeni civil war and against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both these players try to get others to do most of their fighting and dying for them.

Iran’s powerful support for Shiite militias is well-documented. Lebanese Hezbollah has evolved into a central pillar of Iran’s retaliatory capability against Israel, and more recently has answered Iran’s call to provide reliable ground forces to prop up the Assad regime in Syria. Lebanese Hezbollah is no militia: It has Zelzal-1 missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Hezbollah has large stocks of advanced anti-tank guided missiles and Explosively-Formed Penetrator (EFP) roadside bombs capable of penetrating any Israeli tank. Iran as also supplied Hezbollah with advanced C-802 anti-shipping missiles, which crippled an Israeli warship in 2006, and most recently with even more advanced Yakhont anti-ship missiles. Now Iran seems to have provided its Shiite Houthi allies with C-802 missiles, which have been used in a number of attacks on United Arab Emirates (UAE) warships in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The Houthis are inflicting heavy damage on the Saudi military, destroying scores of U.S.-supplied main battle tanks and other armoured vehicles using Iranian-provided anti-tank guided missiles. Iran’s proxies are seizing terrain in southern Saudi Arabia and lobbing Scud missiles at military bases deep within the kingdom. In Iraq the Iranian-backed militias have been provided with Iranian air support, artillery, electronic warfare equipment and medical support. Badr, the main Shiite militia in Iraq, fought as a military division in the Iranian order of battle during the Iran-Iraq War. Badr now leads Iraq’s largest security institution, the half-million Ministry of Interior, and the Shia militias are being formed into a proto-ministry that resembles their patron, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The “Hezbollah-ization” of two key regional states is well-underway.

Most worryingly for Saudi Arabia the Iranian bloc is demonstrating a disregard for long-lasting “red lines” over Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province, which has a majority Shiite population. In 2011 Saudi Arabia and the UAE deployed scores of main battle tanks and armoured personnel carriers to directly safeguard the Bahraini royal family in the face of Arab spring uprisings. This robust move seemed to deeply shake Tehran, triggering the hapless Iranian plot to assassinate Adel Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. In the last year Iran seems to have been acting increasoingly recklessly in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Iraqi Shiite militias like Badr spin-off Kataib Hezbollah have worked with Iranian-backed cells in Bahrain and Eastern Province to import advanced EFP munitions in large numbers with the evident intent of giving Shia communities the ability to self-defend against future Saudi military crackdowns. This kind of game-changing behaviour by Tehran is undoubtedly one reason the Saudi government chose to recently execute Eastern Province Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Long before the current hullabaloo Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Gulf States have been slowly cultivating their own network of military proxies. The first major recipient of Gulf military support was the Saudi-supported Lebanese government. The UAE sent nine fully-armed and crewed SA-342L Gazelle helicopters to help the Lebanese government crush Al-Qaeda-linked Fatah al-Islam at Tripoli’s Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in May 2007. In 2009, a year after Saudi’s King Abdullah called for the U.S. to “cut the head off the snake” by bombing Iran, Riyadh launched a nine-week military campaign against the Houthi rebels in northern Yemen, losing 137 troops. This triggered a major intensification of Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and UAE provision of training, salaries, armored vehicles, and weapons to anti-Houthi militias in northern Yemen. Now the Gulf States and other allies like Pakistan and Somalia are building up new proxy forces in Yemen to assist in the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis.

So what happens next? Saudi and Iran will want to test and hurt each other, signal limits, but not suffer mutual destruction. Iran will begin to stir violence in Eastern Province and Bahrain, and it may try harder to fight supplies through to Yemen by sea by bolstering Houthi coastal missile batteries. The next stage in the Saudi Arabian war with Iran will be an intensification of the proxy war in Syria. This is where Riyadh plans to fight its main battle against Iran. Then Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal signaled as far back as March 2012 that “the arming of the [Syrian] opposition is a duty.” Already Saudi, Qatari and Turkish support has allowed rebels in northwestern Syria to inflict severe armor losses on pro-Assad forces using anti-tank guided missiles. The provision of anti-aircraft missiles may be next. The U.S.-led coalition seems to be backing away from the morally-ambiguous war west of the Euphrates in Syria, where the main opposition to the Islamic State and Assad are radical Salafists that Western nations cannot engage. But Saudi Arabia and its allies have been doing exactly this in Yemen for half a decade and are now likely to take over the war west of the Euphrates in Syria. Riyadh now seems to view Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a lesser evil to the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen: how soon before it views “moderate splinters” of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra the same way in western Syria?

Though neither Saudi Arabian nor Iran envisage an open conventional war between them — a result that Saudi Arabia’s crown price and defence minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently called “a major catastrophe” — there is always the potential for frontier skirmishes on their shared littoral borders and in the neutral space of the Gulf. Shared gas fields and disputed islands are obvious touchpoints. Iran might test missiles closer and closer to Gulf sea-lanes and coasts. Aerial patrols might begin to test each other: this happened during the Iran-Iraq War along the so-called “Fahd Line” until a Saudi interceptor shot down two Iranian fighter aircraft in 1984. Iran (or the Gulf States) could undertake tit-for-tat harassment, boarding or even deniable use of naval mines against each other’s trade routes. (Iran also used this tactic in the 1980s). Cyberwarfare is a likely deniable weapon of choice for both sides also. At some point in the coming years we are likely to see both sides miscalculate and unleash a very short, very sharp burst of military force against each other. This will be a wake-up call. Both Iran and the Gulf States are far more powerfully armed than they were during the Iran-Iraq War. The advanced air forces of the Saudis and their key ally the UAE are now capable of destroying practically all Iran’s port facilities, oil loading terminals and key industries using stand-off precision-guided munitions. Iran can shower the Gulf coastline with multitudinous unguided rockets and a higher concentration of guided long-range missiles than ever before. In 1988 the Iranian navy was destroyed by the United States in a single day of combat — Operation Praying Mantis. Even a day or two of such “push-button warfare” would serve as a reminder to both sides of their overriding imperative to avoid direct conflict and to keep their conflict limited to the territories of unfortunate third-parties. Michael Knights is the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has worked on the military balance between Iran and the Gulf States for over twenty years

Hariri: This is the Best Time to Invest in Lebanon

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by naharnet - Prime Minister Saad Hariri said Thursday that “this is the best time to invest in Lebanon,” after the Lebanese showed “wisdom” during the November political crisis. “This is the best time to invest in Lebanon because, thanks to this political stability and security in our country, we have been able to establish that the country is capable of confronting crises in a wise manner,” Hariri said during a discussion with the participants in the Global Business Summit, organized by Endeavor Lebanon and LIFE at the Four Seasons Hotel. He added that the government's goal is to ensure that the fiscal deficit will not increase from 2017 to 2018, and that the country will be able to meet all financial challenges next year. “Over the course of this year, we achieved many things. People did not believe at first and thought that this consensus could explode at any time. But it enabled us to overcome a very difficult situation in a wise way,” Hariri said. As for Lebanon's ties with Arab Gulf countries, the premier said: “I think the Gulf has a problem with one political party and not with the whole of Lebanon. The Gulf is not going to take steps against all of Lebanon.” “I assure you that we have the best relationship with Saudi Arabia and very good relationship with the UAE and most of the Gulf,” he added. “We will make sure that our disassociation policy will satisfy everyone and not only Lebanon,” Hariri reassured.

Here's how Amazon makes its money

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Saudi, Lebanese ambassadors caught in diplomatic tussle

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Sarah El Deeb| Associated Press BEIRUT: Lebanon’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and his Saudi counterpart are caught in what appears to be a diplomatic tussle over representation, with each country delaying accreditation of the other’s diplomat. Both were named months ago. The delay highlights tension between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon following the bizarre, now-reversed resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Riyadh. A Lebanese diplomat said Wednesday the issue would be “resolved soon.” The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, didn’t elaborate. “Diplomatic procedures will be followed,” the diplomat said. “We are committed to positive and good relations with Saudi Arabia.” The issue came up in the Cabinet’s meeting Tuesday. Government official Pierre Abi Assi told reporters following the meeting that Hariri is “keen on finding the appropriate resolution as soon as possible.” Lebanon’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a member of Hariri’s political party, was named to the post in late July but remains unaccredited. The outgoing ambassador remains in the post on acting capacity. Saudi Arabia named its ambassador in September. Ambassador Walid al-Yaacoubi arrived in Lebanon in November, but still has not been sworn in. There was no immediate comment from Saudi officials.