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What would you do with a trillion dollars? Would you try to use it to do some good in the world? Or would you use it to commit serious human rights abuses?
Today, we’re looking at Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), how it’s essentially under the control of one man, and how it has facilitated human rights abuses and benefited from them.
The PIF is what’s known as a sovereign wealth fund. A lot of countries have such funds, often built on oil wealth. It’s basically a pile of surplus money a government has gathered over time and then invested domestically and abroad. The earnings from these investments could be used to help citizens through spending on health care, for example, or education or infrastructure.
In the Saudi case, however, things don’t quite work that way. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund does originate from the country’s vast fossil fuel resources, but it’s often not used to benefit people in Saudi Arabia.
It’s called the “Public Investment Fund,” but it’s not there helping the public.
The nearly one-trillion-US-dollar fund is essentially controlled by one person, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He wields this enormous economic power in a highly personalized manner, and the PIF is used to commit serious human rights abuses. It’s also used to try to whitewash reputational harm from those abuses.
It’s all described in Human Rights Watch’s newest report, The Man Who Bought the World.
It scrutinizes a vast array of Saudi and international documents and concludes the PIF has benefited directly from serious human rights abuses linked to its chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS.
This includes the crown prince’s 2017 “anti-corruption” crackdown that consisted of arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment of detainees, and the extortion of property from Saudi Arabia’s elite.
The PIF has facilitated serious human rights violations linked to MBS through companies it owns and controls.
One example is the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a key critic of the anti-corruption crackdown. Sky Prime Aviation, one of the companies transferred to the PIF during the crackdown, owned the two planes used in 2018 by Saudi agents to travel to Istanbul, where they murdered Khashoggi.
MBS also unilaterally directs enormous sums of state wealth to megaprojects that have hit Saudi Arabia’s most marginalized people hard – migrant workers, rural communities, and poor and working-class residents. Projects have forcibly evicted residents, razed neighborhoods, subjected migrant workers to serious abuses, and silenced communities.
Remember, this is supposed to be state money. It’s harming the public instead.
So, what can be done?
Some international caution would be an absolute minimum. The PIF has investments around the world, and MBS uses sports in particular as a tool for his influence. Just think of the LIV golf tour, the FIFA 2034 World Cup, and Premier League football club Newcastle United.
Any business with ties to the Saudi Public Investment Fund should re-examine those links and make sure they are not also connected to serious human rights abuses.