The indignation is great. Credit Suisse (CS) announced on Thursday that the Saudi National Bank would invest up to CHF 1.5 billion in the major Swiss bank. This makes the Saudi bank the largest shareholder with a stake of 9.9 percent.
Like so much in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi National Bank is run by the royal family. The strong man: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (37), head of the Saudi state fund, holds the position of defense minister and has also been prime minister since September.
The female promoter
Who is this man involved in CS? MBS, as the Crown Prince is also called, is a man with two faces. On the one hand, he is seen as a modernizer who has abolished flogging and the death penalty for young people and is preparing his country for a future without oil sales.
Women have to thank him for far-reaching liberalisation: they are allowed to drive, no longer have to cover themselves, can travel independently and go to the cinema. Against the resistance of religious-conservative circles, it also enabled them to work in paid employment. Within two years, the female employment rate has increased from 20 to 33 percent.
After his apparently ailing father, King Salman (86), appointed him head of the newly created anti-corruption committee in 2017, he had more than 200 businessmen, politicians and princes arrested and seized a total of $106 billion on behalf of the state treasury.
170 km long house planned
His “Vision 2030”, with which he aims to rearrange the country, is spectacular. The core is the construction of a gigantic city and special economic zone in the border triangle with Egypt and Jordan. The “Neom” project covers an area the size of German-speaking Switzerland and is expected to cost $500 billion.
The independent economic zone will have its own legal and fiscal system and will be powered exclusively by wind and solar energy. A 170 km long, 500 m high and 200 m wide building is planned for nine million inhabitants, which will be accessible by metro.
brutal ruler
But as modern and visionary as MBS may seem, it works backwards when contradicted. Amnesty International has described his government as the darkest on human rights and freedoms.
The most famous example is the brutal crackdown on Jamal Khashoggi († 59), who was murdered and sawed in 2018 at the Saudi Consulate General in Istanbul, probably with MBS’s permission. The most recent example of his unscrupulous tyranny is the conviction of Salma al-Shehab (34) for tweeting critical messages about the regime. In August, she was sentenced to 34 years in prison, followed by a 34-year travel ban. Her account didn’t even have 3000 followers.
His performance as general was also a disaster. Two months after he was appointed defense minister in 2015, the then 29-year-old MBS gave the order to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen. With this offensive, he wanted to defeat rival Iran as the Houthis’s protective force with a quick victory.
The war is still going on, more than 100,000 people have been killed so far. Finding a way out of the spiral of violence is difficult. US President Joe Biden (79) has withdrawn military aid to Saudi Arabia.
“New Time of Terror”
The critics say MBS appears to be just a reformer. Saudi social anthropologist Madawi al-Rasheed (60) writes in a column in the “Middle East Eye” that he is presented as a “young, visionary future king” whose official propaganda aims to hide a new era of terror.
Her verdict on the Crown Prince: “He is an uneasy mixture of Stalin’s iron fist and Western neoliberal capitalism.”