Photo: The White House/Cropped by User:Siqbal/Wikimedia Commons
Saudi Arabia’s reform-seeking Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman aims to recover around $100 billion from 200 princes and businessmen implicated in a sweeping crackdown on corruption.
The majority of the elites facing charges expressed agreement to settlements under which they would hand over assets to the government, says Salman.
The ambitious new leader disclosed this in an interview with The New York Times while rejecting as “ludicrous” the suggestion that this anti-corruption campaign was a power grab.
“Our country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today,” he noted.
“The calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government spending was siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom. Over the years the government launched more than one ‘war on corruption’ and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up,”the heir to the Saudi King argues.
The crown prince says his father — the King — who has never been tainted by corruption charges during his nearly five decades as governor of Riyadh, ascended to the throne in 2015 (at a time of falling oil prices), he vowed to put a stop to it all.
“My father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to collect all the information about corruption — at the top., he explains.
This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they came up with about 200 names.”
Each suspected billionaire or prince was arrested and given two choices: “We show them all the files that we have and as soon as they see those about 95 percent agree to a settlement.”
“About 1 percent are able to prove they are clean and their case is dropped right there. About 4 percent say they are not corrupt and with their lawyers want to go to court.”
In an unprecedented measure, Riyadh said two weeks ago that it had questioned 208 people in the crackdown and released seven without charge. Dozens of princes, senior officials and top businessmen are believed to be held in Riyadh’s opulent Ritz Carlton hotel as their cases are processed.
Over 2,000 Saudi bank accounts have been frozen during the probe, causing concern that the crackdown could damage the economy. But the government has insisted that the companies of detained businessmen will continue operating normally.
”We have experts making sure no businesses are bankrupted in the process,” Prince Mohammed told the Times.
