He’s the Crown Prince who imprisoned scores of his fellow Saudi billionaires in a five-star hotel in Riyadh in a dramatic purge on corruption.
And yesterday Mohammed bin Salman arrived in Britain, where he met the PM and senior royals.
Here, JOHN R BRADLEY explains how this young radical is trying to drag the deeply conservative Saudi society into the 21st century.
(VERY) CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
Saudi royals have been described as the world’s most decadent ruling family since the Borgias in Renaissance Italy.
Their favourite indulgences are palaces the size of small towns; yachts, super-cars and private jets; five-star hotel suites often rented for years at a time; and prostitutes, drugs and booze enjoyed in exclusive nightclubs and casinos around the world.
The king’s plane has a gold escalator and he is accompanied by an entourage of 1,500 people and 500 tons of luggage, including 100 limousines.
Yesterday Mohammed bin Salman arrived in Britain (pictured outside Downing Street), where he met the PM and senior royals. Here, JOHN R BRADLEY explains how this young radical is trying to drag the deeply conservative Saudi society into the 21st century
Belatedly, King Salman, 82, and his son, the Crown Prince, are trying to promote the message that the days of flaunting ill-gotten gains are over, and bin Salman has slightly more modest travel arrangements.
However, they are hardly leading by example. The King owns a dozen apartments worth £25 million in the affluent 16th arrondissement of Paris, a luxury chateau on the Côte d’Azur and is linked to a number of multi-million-pound properties in London.
Meanwhile, the Crown Prince is rumoured to have been the buyer of ‘Salvator Mundi’ a Leonardo da Vinci painting sold last year for £325 million.
He has also purchased a 50,000 sq ft palace near Versailles for £200m. Then there’s the £360m yacht he reportedly bought on the spur of the moment in 2015 — as you do.
PURGING OF THE BILLIONAIRES
Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to the world’s attention last November when, soon after being appointed heir, he ordered the arrests of hundreds of princes, businessmen and government officials on corruption and money-laundering charges.
Most were interned in the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh. There were reports that a number were tortured.
Detainees included the Crown Prince’s one-time rival, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah (a former head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard and son of former King Abdullah); the billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Saudi’s most famous investor and one of the world’s richest men (he is also owner of The Savoy hotel in London) — who told Reuters he maintained his innocence of any corruption; and other royals thought to resent his rise to power.
All but 56 have now been released, most after reaching undisclosed settlements.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman (pictured with the Queen) came to the world’s attention last November when, soon after being appointed heir, he ordered the arrests of hundreds of princes, businessmen and government officials on corruption and money-laundering charges
It is claimed that between £70 billion and £500 billion of fraudulently obtained money and assets have been recovered.
Bin Salman also wrested control of all three branches of the Saudi security forces, and has since appointed his own yes-men to all leadership posts in the armed forces.
However, while his short-term position has clearly been strengthened, many fear that he has created the risk of long- term instability.
The personal and family vendettas unleashed by the purge in such a tribal country will last for generations. Except for his own full brothers, bin Salman has enraged and publicly humiliated all the branches of the royal family.
How much loyalty he commands will become clear when his father abdicates and he ascends to the throne.
THE LIGHT-FINGERED ROYAL FAMILY
Saudi Arabia has the world’s biggest known oil reserves, and the massive petroleum sector generates almost half the country’s gross domestic product.
This immense wealth has given the 15,000-strong royal family more than £215 bn a year to spend.
The majority of this pays for defence, local infrastructure and development, and an extensive welfare programme — for example housing and education grants and bonuses for civil servants — designed to buy the loyalty of the masses.
Tens of billions a year, though, are shamelessly siphoned off by the royals in monthly stipends.
They range from a few hundred dollars a month for low-ranking members, to hundreds of thousands for the direct descendants of the kingdom’s founder Ibn Saud, who established the unified state in 1932. This consumes at least 10 per cent of GDP.
Saudi Arabia has the world’s biggest known oil reserves, and the massive petroleum sector generates almost half the country’s gross domestic product. Pictured: Saudi delegation meets the UK cabinet
The princes have amassed billions more through arms deals and construction projects, and, between them they own as much as 40 per cent of the kingdom’s land. Then there is outright theft, since the princes have historically been above the law.
Commercial banks long ago stopped giving them loans because they were never repaid, and likewise high-end car dealerships stopped selling to them because they would buy the entire showroom with a small deposit and then disappear.
Meanwhile, huge numbers of ordinary Saudis live in poverty, and millions have no direct supply of drinking water to their homes.
Even Jeddah, a major city, still has no properly functioning sewage system.
SAUDI ARABIA’S EXTREMIST CREED
Wahhabism, the dominant religion, is a form of Sunni Islam founded in the 18th century by a fanatical preacher named Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab.
His aim was to return the faithful to how Islam was practised at the time of the Prophet.
He advocated a literal interpretation of the Koran, and railed against any acceptance of modernity.
His condemnation of non-Wahhabi Sunnis as heretics who must convert to his creed or face being slaughtered made him especially feared, while his followers faced death by public beheading for crimes including murder, witchcraft, adultery, sorcery and apostasy.
Smoking, alcohol and music were banned, and the sexes were strictly segregated.
The movement would have remained a small tribal cult were it not for a fateful alliance between its leader and the dynastic House of Saud.
Undoing a century of Wahhabi influence is a tall order, but the Crown Prince has already made extraordinary progress. Cinemas are opening for the first time since the Seventies
The Wahhabi fanatics were recruited as the Sauds’ foot-soldiers, and when Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 they were rewarded with control of the education and judicial systems, and the religious police.
By the Seventies, the Saudi royals were encouraging the Wahhabis to promote their beliefs globally, and they have spent $100 billion indoctrinating tens of millions of Muslims through mosques, schools, religious texts and media outlets.
These mosques have been linked to Islamist extremism in Britain, Europe, and South-East Asia, and the Saudis have funded jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria.
Many terrorism experts believe that the extremist Islam practised by Islamic State is barely distinguishable from Wahhabism.
PRINCE’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Undoing a century of Wahhabi influence is a tall order, but the Crown Prince has already made extraordinary progress. Cinemas are opening for the first time since the Seventies.
Jazz festivals, rap concerts, and even fashion shows are suddenly the norm.
Five thousand live entertainment events are scheduled for this year — in a country where, until just a few months ago, football matches and beheadings were the only forms of public entertainment.
Under the Crown Prince’s influence women will be allowed to drive from June, they no longer need permission from a male guardian to open a business, and they can now join the military as soldiers.
Women will be allowed to drive from June, they no longer need permission from a male guardian to open a business, and they can now join the military as soldiers.
A senior cleric has issued a ruling saying women are not obliged to wear the abaya, a long robe-like dress, in public, and the goal is for women to make up one third of the workforce by 2030.
The religious police have been severely curtailed, and a draft Saudi initiative to stop funding and promoting Wahhabism abroad has been sent to leading Western officials for consultation.
AWESOME MILITARY MIGHT
Saudi Arabia allocates 10 per cent of its annual budget to defence (compared with 3.3 per cent in the U.S. and 2 per cent in the UK).
That figure is set to increase dramatically over the coming years. The combined manpower of the armed forces — at least 700,000 — is impressive for a country with a native population of about 20 million.
As is the arsenal at their disposal. This includes Eurofighter Typhoons, American F-15 Eagle fighter jets, M1A2 Abrams tanks, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters.
The navy’s vessels are also made to order in American or European shipyards. There’s just one problem — and it’s a big one.
Much of the weaponry bought in the initial spending sprees of the Eighties and Nineties was bought by princes as a way of securing kickbacks for themselves from arms suppliers, and was left to rust in the desert.
Saudi Arabia allocates 10 per cent of its annual budget to defence (compared with 3.3 per cent in the U.S. and 2 per cent in the UK)
Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who was defence minister for decades until 2011, was so notorious for it that he was known as Prince Ten Per Cent.
The result: after almost four years of warfare in neighbouring Yemen, the poorest Arab country, the Saudi armed forces have still not managed to come near to defeating a few thousand Kalashnikov-wielding Houthi rebels, who are intent on overthrowing the Yemeni government supported by Riyadh.
This failure in the war has not been lost on the Crown Prince. Recently, he unceremoniously fired the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the army commander and the air defence chief.
A MIGHTY POWER STRUGGLE . . .
One of the most pressing questions for the new Crown Prince is how he will pick his way through the tangled religious politics in the region.
Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia has viewed Iran as its main rival.
This is because the Iranians follow the different, bitterly opposed branch of Shia Islam. This antagonism now defines much of the Middle East’s geopolitics.
Tensions came to a head in 2011 with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
Along with Turkey, Qatar and the UAE, Saudi Arabia gave Sunni rebel groups billions of dollars in a bid to oust President Assad, because the Syrian leader and many of his most important acolytes are members of a Shia sect called the Alawites.
That means they are natural allies of Iran and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, both of which joined Russia in sending arms and troops to support Assad’s Syrian government.
The resulting Syrian war — which also served as a proxy conflict between Saudi and Iran — has cost at least half a million lives.
One of the most pressing questions for the new Crown Prince is how he will pick his way through the tangled religious politics in the region
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen, believing that Iran is backing the country’s Houthi rebels (who, again, are Shia). Assad, though, has survived in Syria, and the Saudis have failed in Yemen. Riyadh has been outmanoeuvred geopolitically.
Iran’s influence now extends through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and it has strengthened ties with Russia.
Even worse, the endless conflict with Iran has alienated some of Saudi’s most important traditional regional allies.
A trade blockade by Saudi Arabia against neighbouring Qatar — a tiny but fabulously wealthy emirate — was imposed last year to punish them for refusing to cut ties with Iran. But this has resulted in a rift between the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies, such as Kuwait and Oman, which — despite a history of friendship with Saudi Arabia — have refused to back its stance.
. . . AND A MOST UNLIKELY ALLIANCE
Saudi Arabia now has only three strong regional Arab allies: the fellow Gulf monarchies of Bahrain and the UAE, and Sunni Egypt.
However, an unlikely new alliance has emerged between Saudi Arabia and Israel, based on the two countries’ mutual hatred of the mullahs in Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Few could have predicted this dramatic development. After all, Saudi Arabia still does not even recognise the Jewish state’s right to exist, while for decades Israeli leaders have railed against the vile anti-Semitism spewed out by the Saudi education system, media and mosques.
But war — or at least the threat of war — makes for strange bedfellows.
The Israelis and Saudis have coordinated their support for Sunni rebel groups in Syria, and behind the scenes now enjoy unprecedented diplomatic and intelligence ties.