Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

WikiLeaks: Saudi Royal Welfare Program Revealed

Author:    
Source:     The Huffington Post/Reuters
Publication Date:     1-Mar-11
 Link: WikiLeaks: Saudi Royal Welfare Program Revealed
Stephan:   I went to Saudi back in the 70s and was struck with the utter artificiality of the culture. It was like a nation of drug dealers, some of whom happened to be not only completely corrupt by intensely religious. The palaces along one road were like a series of hotels. Men in burnooses with gold chains, fast cars, and blonde women. The high ranking men, who were my hosts, lived in an opulence that was like a Hunter Thompson Las Vegas hallucination on steroids. They were oddly feminine. I never got past the public rooms, and one never saw the Arab women, except as black bags passing like wraths in the malls. Gold was everywhere. And beneath it was a monstrous system of what amounted to indentured labor. It is the strangest and most disturbing country I have ever been in, and it could only exist because of our addiction to oil.

LONDON — When Saudi King Abdullah arrived home last week, he came bearing gifts: handouts worth $37 billion, apparently intended to placate Saudis of modest means and insulate the world’s biggest oil exporter from the wave of protest sweeping the Arab world.

But some of the biggest handouts over the past two decades have gone to his own extended family, according to unpublished American diplomatic cables dating back to 1996.
The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Reuters, provide remarkable insight into how much the vast royal welfare program has cost the country — not just financially but in terms of undermining social cohesion.

Besides the huge monthly stipends that every Saudi royal receives, the cables detail various money-making schemes some royals have used to finance their lavish lifestyles over the years. Among them: siphoning off money from ‘off-budget’ programs controlled by senior princes, sponsoring expatriate workers who then pay a small monthly fee to their royal patron and, simply, ‘borrowing from the banks, and not paying them back.’

As long ago as 1996, U.S. officials noted that such unrestrained behavior could fuel a backlash against the Saudi elite. In the assessment of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh in a cable from […]

Read the Full Article