Saudi Arabia Is Putinizing, Not Modernizing - Bloomberg

Saudi Arabia Is Putinizing, Not Modernizing - Bloomberg:

"It was perhaps inevitable that the Saudi royal purge, in which 11 princes and dozens of bureaucrats stand accused of corruption, would be compared with Russian President Vladimir Putin's and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping's highly public, and highly selective, anti-graft campaigns. But Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who initiated the crackdown, resembles Putin in other dangerous ways, too.

There is no question that Saudi Arabia is, and has long been, thoroughly corrupt. With thousands of royals alone, who, in an absolute monarchy, naturally see the public purse as their own, that's no surprise. But talking about it has never been safe, even for a prince. In the last three years -- just as MbS, as the crown prince is known, rose to power -- three dissident members of the Saudi royal family have been kidnapped in Europe and flown clandestinely home. The most senior of them, Prince Sultan bin Turki, nephew to King Fahd, who ruled Saudi Arabia until 2005, was an outspoken critic of corrupt practices in the Saudi government. The Saudis kidnapped him and 20 members of his entourage in February, 2016, and he has not been seen since soldiers violently subdued him at the Riyadh airport.

In any authoritarian regime, fighting corruption can only be a pretext for power consolidation because the nature of the system invites corruption. It's always of the same kind: People close to the source of power get the most lucrative government orders. Prince Miteb bib Abdullah, former head of the National Guard, allegedly awarded $10 million in contracts to his own companies; former Riyadh governor Turki bin Abdullah is accused of doing the same on the lucrative Riyadh Metro project. As in Russia and China, however, people around the throne who don't line their pockets are viewed with more suspicion than those who do. A purge of several dozen individuals, including the relatively liberal billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal -- who, for example, advocated lifting Saudi Arabia's driving ban for women long before MbS decided to lift it -- doesn't change the essence of the regime and is as alarming as Putin's arrest of oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. That move cemented Putin's power and made other wealthy Russians fall into line, leading eventually to the recentralization and tight government control of the Russian economy."



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