JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia will host a key investment summit on Tuesday, overshadowed by the killing of critic Jamal Khashoggi that has prompted a wave of policymakers and corporate giants to withdraw.
Just ahead of the three-day Future Investment Initiative (FII), dubbed “Davos in the desert”, the kingdom sought to defuse the crisis with an about-face admission on Saturday that the journalist died in its consulate in Istanbul.
But that has failed to stem an exodus from the summit, whose organisers have taken down a list of speakers from its website.
Dozens of executives — from bankers JP Morgan to carmaker Ford and ride-hailing app Uber — scrapped plans to attend.
Media powerhouses like Bloomberg, CNN and the Financial Times have also pulled out and on Saturday, Australia withdrew its representatives, saying it was “no longer appropriate” to attend, due to the Khashoggi affair.
On Saturday, organisers said more than 120 speakers and moderators will participate. Last Monday, they had listed more than 150 speakers.
The event seeks to project the historically insular kingdom as a lucrative business destination, in a bid to diversify its oil-reliant economy and set the stage for new ventures and multi-billion dollar contracts.
At last year’s inaugural FII — a star-studded event at Riyadh’s glittering Ritz-Carlton hotel –- Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was lionised as a visionary as he wowed investors with talking robots and plans for a futuristic mega-city called NEOM.
Billed last year as an economic coming-out party for the conservative petro-state, the FII has now come to symbolise global outrage over the silencing of critics.
The prince, widely known as MBS, faces what the risk consultancy Eurasia Group calls “an acute public relations crisis”.
Khashoggi, who had criticised Prince Mohammed, was last seen walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2.
After weeks of vehement denials, the kingdom’s assertion on Saturday that the journalist was killed in a “brawl and fist fight” inside the consulate –- without revealing the whereabouts of his body — was met with scepticism around the world.
“The Ubers and JP Morgans of the world have calculated that the cost of being currently associated with brand MBS is higher than the cost of losing out on taking a slice of Saudi Arabia’s economy,” said Michael Stephens, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute.
