#SaudiArabia: $3.5bn fraud case set to define crown prince’s anti-graft campaign | Financial Times

Saudi Arabia: $3.5bn fraud case set to define crown prince’s anti-graft campaign | Financial Times

Once one of the most powerful security officials in Saudi Arabia, Saad al-Jabri was feted by western powers. He was integral to multibillion-dollar counter-terrorism efforts and advised senior members of the Saudi royal family before falling foul of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s rise to power and going into exile in 2017. He would later accuse the prince of sending a hit squad to Canada to kill him, an allegation with echoes of the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. 

But in the latest twist of a bitter dispute that goes to the heart of Saudi power, al-Jabri is the one who now stands accused. In January, 10 companies owned by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund that Prince Mohammed chairs, filed a civil lawsuit in Canada accusing the former interior ministry official of masterminding a $3.5bn fraud using front companies that were established more than a decade ago as cover for Saudi Arabia’s covert counter-terrorism operations. The Ontario court issued a worldwide freeze on al-Jabri’s assets. In March, it rejected an attempt to have the order lifted. 

Supporters of the crown prince insist the case is part of a broader anti-corruption campaign designed to break down systems of patronage. Others view it as a blatant effort to silence someone who knows many of the kingdom’s deepest secrets. 

It is a struggle that goes to the heart of Prince Mohammed’s brash and autocratic rule. To his loyalists, the anti-corruption drive, backed by his father, King Salman, is necessary to cleanse a rotten system and fulfil the crown prince’s pledge to modernise an economy addicted to state petrodollars and riddled with patronage networks. To others, the dispute with al-Jabri epitomises the young royal’s ruthless pursuit of rivals and perceived opponents as hundreds of Saudis, including princes, businessmen and civil servants, have been detained.