The chosen prison was more Palace of Versailles than Château d’If. The wedding-white Ritz-Carlton complex in Riyadh towers over 52 acres of landscaped gardens and is frilled with fountains and palm trees. Suites cost upwards of £1,500 a night. Guests can enjoy a luxurious swimming pool, a gentlemen-only spa, a cigar lounge and a bowling alley. President Trump had stayed there. So when the hotel’s pampered guests were suddenly called to the foyer with their bags one night last November, they had no idea that the five-star resort was about to become the world’s most bizarre jail.
Although dossiers on each inmate-to-be had been compiled years in advance, few in Saudi Arabia knew what would take place at dawn on 4 November – least of all the royals who were targeted. The regime took no chances: 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi’s de facto ruler and the architect of the operation, had allegedly employed highly trained foreign mercenaries to do the initial work, fearing that Saudi guards might talk. And though most of the hotel’s suites and rooms were functioning as normal until just hours before the crackdown started, some had been secretly modified in advance.
Once the guests had been sent to alternative accommodation, the round-up began. In a desert camp out of town, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the Crown Prince’s relatives and one of the country’s richest men, was awoken by a 3am call from court officials demanding he come to the royal palace. His half-cousin Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, the son of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and commander of the elite National Guard, received an equally abrupt summons – one that ended in the Ritz-Carlton for both men.
One by one, buses and motorcades of prisoners and their aides and guards began drawing up to the glittering gates. More than 200 were detained, including princes, serving ministers and some of the richest tycoons in the region; 19 Saudi businessmen were also reportedly summoned from their residences in the UAE and deported to Riyadh by the Emiratis, whose leaders were involved in the purge.
Mohammed bin Salman – or MBS, as he’s frequently known – told a shocked world it was part of a new anti-corruption drive. In interviews, he has estimated that as much as 10 percent of the government’s annual spend – £7 to £14bn – was ‘disappearing’ every year. ‘The idea,’ he told CBS, ‘is not to get money, but to punish the corrupt and send a clear signal that whoever engages in corrupt deals will face the law.’
Little information about charges has been formally disclosed, but it is no secret that Saudi royals have been embroiled in scandals in the past. Some of the 200 detained have made headlines for alleged involvement in bribery, dodgy weapons deals, money laundering, tax evasion and even lavish sex parties. The kingdom’s top prosecutor said that, in total, 381 people were investigated in a crackdown that brought in more than £72bn. In the process, over 2,000 bank accounts were allegedly frozen. Dozens of new judges were called in.
At the time, the Saudi public welcomed the dramatic move. Many congratulated MBS on punishing the royals, who were usually above the law. Meanwhile, the Western media mocked the princes in their cushy cages. ‘Only in Saudi,’ people brayed on Twitter as they shared photos of the five-star resort. Some claimed the VIP inmates were being treated too well. According to Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst who spoke to two former detainees after their release, they were mostly bored. Upon arrival, people were checked by doctors and then measured by a tailor for the traditional long shirt, or dishdash, as they needed clothes for the long haul. Then they were ‘checked in’ to their five-star cells. ‘[Most detainees] weren’t allowed to exercise,’ he told Tatler. ‘They were kept in their rooms and unable to speak to others who were held there. But they had room service, they had full access to satellite TV, the kitchen was operational, they just gained weight.’ Shihabi has admitted that calls were monitored, mobile phones impounded and the internet banned. Inmates were intermittently questioned by Saudi interrogators who were ‘tough but professional. The people to whom I spoke said they saw no evidence of mistreatment.’
Not everyone paints so rosy a picture. Mobile-phone footage leaked to the press shortly after the arrests led to speculation that the detainees were under armed guard and sleeping on mattresses in the hotel ballroom. One royal told Tatler that inmates were only permitted rooms in the hotel once they agreed to sign over cash. There was also a sinister side to the gilded cages. Preparation of rooms and suites had been meticulous, according to friends and associates of those held. Windows were bolted down to prevent attempts at escape or suicide. Doors were removed to allow constant access for armed guards assigned to each inmate. Cameras were mounted throughout the apartments, including in the bathrooms. Anything that could be used to self-harm was confiscated, including glass shower screens, curtain cords and heavy ashtrays.
At least one prince was allegedly hospitalised after he fainted during questioning – he had never been shouted at before. But some detainees were treated worse. Speaking to Tatler, members of the royal family and confidants of the inmates claimed that some were deprived of sleep, beaten up and even hung upside down to force them to sign ‘settlements’ handing over their wealth, although no further evidence was provided. It was, perhaps, to quash those rumours that Alwaleed bin Talal was permitted to conduct an interview with Reuters, at 1am one night in February, three months into his detention. This was the first and only interview of any detainee. In the footage, the famed billionaire appears gaunt and exhausted as he conducts a tour of his palatial suite. The rooms are festooned with flowers, golden urns and overflowing baskets of fruit. Prince Alwaleed shows off his marble-floored lounge, dining room and kitchen. ‘I feel at home, there is no problem at all,’ he says, pointing to his gym shoes, his Diet Coke cans and his specially prepared vegan salads. ‘There are no charges, there are just some discussions between me and the government. Rest assured that this is a clean operation,’ he adds. However, one of the prince’s associates told Tatler he didn’t buy Alwaleed’s cheeriness: ‘You can see him showing off his ketchup and mustard, but he doesn’t eat this kind of stuff; the prince is extremely health-conscious, he is a vegan. I feel like that was a message.’
A message, perhaps, that all was not well for these ‘pampered’ prisoners? The information vacuum has inevitably been filled with various differing accounts. The New York Times reported that sources claimed that a top aide to one of the princes was tortured to death during questioning. General Ali al-Qahtani was a military officer in the service of the powerful Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a former Governor of Riyadh Province and brother to Prince Miteb, both of whom were held in the Ritz-Carlton. ‘General al-Qahtani died in detention, a man who was very loyal to Prince Turki,’ according to a member of the Saudi royal family. ‘They were interrogating him to find out any information about the prince. I was told by employees who work with Prince Turki that the body was not normal. There were signs that he had been beaten, there were burn marks and his neck was broken.’
A Saudi official told the New York Timesthat ‘all allegations of abuse and torture of those investigated during the anti-corruption proceedings are absolutely untrue.’ The same official added that the detainees had had ‘full access’ to legal counsel and medical care. (The Saudi embassy in London has failed to respond to Tatler’s inquiries on this and other matters for more than a month.) The New York Times also reported ] [that after Prince Turki’s other brother, Prince Mishaal bin Abdullah, complained about General al-Qahtani’s treatment, he too was locked up in the Ritz-Carlton. Mishaal and Miteb were later released, but the family speculates that Miteb, though free, has been put on a golden leash. According to some Saudi officials, Miteb signed a settlement for more than $1bn not long after his arrest, having been accused, they said, of embezzlement and of awarding government contracts to his own firms and hiring non-existent employees. (Prince Miteb has yet to comment on the matter.) Since then, he has been seen in public just once, engaging in a brief and awkward chat with his jailer and cousin MBS at an annual horse-racing ceremony in Riyadh. Like most of the high-profile detainees, he has not been allowed to leave the country, according to four sources. The princes were apparently told they would ‘never see the inside of a plane ever again’. Members of the royal family have said that the released detainees have been forced to wear ankle bracelets with listening devices. Former detainees have, they say, come up with ways to work around this, like playing music to cover up the sound. The authorities, however, have denied this charge as well.
Whatever the truth, it was a spectacular coup for the Crown Prince. His has been an astonishing rise to power, despite the fact that he is neither the eldest nor the most experienced of his father’s nine surviving sons. Unsurprisingly, he is a divisive figure. His critics view him as a Machiavellian schemer who has manoeuvred himself into position since the ageing King Salman, 82, began showing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s six years ago. To his supporters, both in Saudi Arabia and the West, he is the driven architect of the kingdom’s much-needed Arab Spring.
MBS first came to international attention aged 29, as the world’s youngest defence minister, an appointment he secured just hours after his father ascended the throne in 2015. Last June, he was elevated to the hallowed position of Crown Prince, effectively ousting his older cousin, 58-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef, the country’s experienced and highly popular interior minister. Saudi and American sources claim that bin Nayef fiercely resisted stepping down: perhaps to counter such talk, the young replacement was filmed bowing and kissing bin Nayef’s hand in traditional deference during the handover ceremony. Then on, 4 November, after Prince Miteb was detained in the Ritz-Carlton, MBS took control of Saudi Arabia’s elite National Guard, thus bringing all three wings of the security forces under his control.
Many believe MBS is his father’s favourite because of his upbringing. Unlike some of his brothers, he was not educated abroad in the USA or the UK but kept at home and brought up in a sprawling villa right in the heart of the royal court. ‘This is how he climbed the greasy pole. He grew up in the snake pit of the court and came out on top,’ says Hugh Miles, founder of Arab Digestand a specialist on the Saudi royal family.
What MBS lacked in formal education he made up for in training on the job. He took an eager interest in his father’s work when King Salman was still Crown Prince and Governor of Riyadh, avidly taking notes at meetings. (Later, when his father’s health had deteriorated, there were rumours that MBS was running interviews with the ailing king by feeding him answers via iPad.) MBS also had no hesitation in using his position to personal advantage. His business interests started in property when he was a teenager, according to those who knew him. There have been other examples of ruthlessness. Sources close to the court have said that MBS put his mother, Princess Fahda bint Falah al-Hathleen, under house arrest two years ago and barred her from seeing her husband. This is, again, denied by the Saudi government.
Palace intrigue aside, MBS has made welcome changes in Saudi Arabia. His Vision 2030 is a socio-economic reform programme that aims to shift Saudi Arabia’s economy away from its dependency on oil, given that prices for crude have halved in the past four years. It also seeks to end the terrible hold of the Islamic revival movement of the Seventies, which has seen Saudi Arabia dominated by powerful and ultraconservative clerics and accused of sponsoring terrorism all around the world. The plan is anchored in dragging the kingdom into the 21st century, and MBS’s key ideas include getting women into the workforce. In the past six months, he has lifted a decades-long ban on women driving, allowed female citizens to enter football stadiums, curbed the vicious morality police and, in his CBS interview, questioned the need for women to wear the hijab. In April, he lifted a 35-year-old ban on cinemas, and the country’s first cinema since the Eighties opened with a screening of Black Panther.
All of this has been broadcast loudly throughout the West. In March, MBS arrived in London on the crest of a massive advertising campaign. Throughout the city, digital billboards blared, ‘He is bringing change to Saudi Arabia’, while trucks drove around carrying the hashtag ‘Welcome Saudi Crown Prince’. In April, he completed a three-week tour of the US, where he has enjoyed huge support. Alongside meetings with President Trump and some of the key players in his administration, the Crown Prince also spent time with celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and the action-movie star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who caused a stir after meeting MBS at the star-packed dinner that took place at Rupert Murdoch’s Beverly Hills residence in early April – Johnson wrote a report about MBS’s ‘deep rooted, yet modern views on the world’ on his official Facebook page, adding that ‘I look forward to my first visit soon to Saudi Arabia. I’ll be sure to bring my finest tequila to share with His Royal Highness and family’. He accompanied the message with an emoji of a cocktail glass.
Wooing Western investors is crucial. Money is badly needed for Saudi Arabia’s shrinking coffers: amid plummeting oil prices, Saudi’s foreign reserves have fallen from $737bn at their height, in August of 2014, to $488bn in December 2017. A successful IPO for Aramco, the national oil
company, is crucial. Still, one of MBS’s very first moves as defence minister was to plunge his country into a devastatingly expensive proxy war against the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen. Three years on, the conflict, which the UN says has sparked the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, shows no signs of abating. The Houthis, meanwhile, have developed the capacity to fire cross-border missiles that have reached as far as Riyadh airport. And perhaps that need for money explains why MBS corralled some of the kingdom’s richest people into the Ritz-Carlton. Among the most prominent businessmen were Bakr bin Laden of the Saudi Binladin construction group (which the government now controls), Saoud al-Daweesh (the former chief executive of Saudi Telecom) and Walid bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim, the billionaire chairman of the Middle East Broadcasting Center television network. But the most familiar face was that of Prince Alwaleed, at that time the owner of the Four Seasons hotel chain and a major investor in corporations including Apple, Twitter and Citigroup. According to Forbes magazine, Alwaleed was worth $17.5 billion before he signed an undisclosed settlement deal with the authorities to win his freedom. There are rumours he may have already parted with as much as £4.3bn; his Kingdom Holding Company revealed some details of the mysterious deal in March, announcing that the prince had signed over to the government hundreds of millions of dollars in annual dividends from his business – totalling up to £57m per quarter. Many have questioned whether he has control over any of his assets any more.
Some claim that the outspoken prince was hurt in detention and briefly moved to a jail cell to speed up a settlement, a suggestion the Saudi authorities and the prince himself have very strongly denied. There is, though, some dissenting testimony: Alan Bender, a Canada-based businessman, told Tatler that he was flown to Riyadh via the UAE in December to help with the investigations. Bender is well connected to top Emirati and Saudi officials, and had represented Prince Alwaleed’s wife (who claims she was mistreated) in a separation settlement and thus had regular contact with the prince.
Bender told Tatler he was taken to a house near the Ritz-Carlton and told to speak to the prince via a video screen. There, he was instructed to read out a script containing details of what transpired with Alwaleed’s wife; he speculates that he was asked to do this to ‘break’ the prince. ‘On the screen I could see a room of a dark, greyish colour with no windows. The walls looked like a clean jail cell, you could hear the squeaking of cell doors. I felt this was not a room in the Ritz-Carlton,’ Mr Bender said. The prince, he said, appeared depressed and unshaven. ‘I read out the script. He just nodded.’
Mr Bender claimed that, on the plane home, senior Emirati officials helping with the operation admitted the prince had been hospitalised twice during the three-month ordeal. ‘When I asked why Alwaleed looked broken, [an official] said, “When you hang him upside down, what is he going to do, what choice does he have?”’ Mr Bender recalled.
In an interview granted to Bloomberg in March, Alwaleed repeatedly denied rumours he had been hurt. He also refused to confirm or deny his settlement with the state. ‘I need to clear my name, No. 1, and to clear up a lot of the lies,’ he said from his Riyadh home. ‘They said I was tortured, I was sent to a prison, you know, during my 83 days in the Ritz-Carlton hotel. All these
were lies. I stayed there the whole time. I was never tortured,’ he added. The prince spoke about filling his 83 days with praying, meditating, swimming and walking. ‘I’ve forgotten and forgiven the whole process completely. It’s behind me,’ he went on, before admitting he is still being monitored. He ended by wielding a picture of himself with MBS and praising the Crown Prince for ‘establishing a new era in Saudi Arabia. Any person who does not support what Mohammed bin Salman is doing right now, I say, is a traitor,’ he added.
And perhaps treachery and dissent are in the air. MBS has managed to upset several prominent lines to the throne: anger is rife. According to three sources, including a prince, in January the detentions sparked a gun battle at the palace of the Governor of Riyadh between dozens of princes from the al-Kabir wing of the Saudi Arabian royal family and MBS’s security contractors. MBS has also laid himself open to questions regarding his lavish spending habits. In 2015, just months after starting the war in Yemen, he famously bought a 440ft yacht for £452m while on holiday in France. Later that year, he bought the Château Louis XIV, near Versailles, for £210m.
Then there’s the matter of the £335m sale of Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Christ, to Bader bin Abdullah, a little-known Saudi prince who had allegedly been contracted to buy it by MBS himself. The price of the painting is said to have reached dizzying heights because, as both the Financial Times and the Mail Online reported, the Emiratis and the Saudi Arabians were, in fact, unwittingly bidding against each other, each believing they were up against their mortal foe Qatar. As the Crown Prince said to CBS: ‘I’m a rich person and not a poor person. I’m not Gandhi or Mandela.’
Be that as it may, the Ritz-Carlton episode has changed the power balance in Saudi Arabia forever. It’s telling that Forbes decided to strike all 10 Saudis off their list of billionaires this year, fearing they had signed all their money away and also citing ‘these shifting sands of truth’. It has certainly marked the first time the Saudi Arabian royals have turned on one another in such a spectacular way. It could, says Hugh Miles, herald the end of the House of Saud: ‘MBS has broken all the rules, he has done it publicly and he has humiliated them. There is no branch of the family that hasn’t been affected.’
There are certainly rumblings of discontent in royal halls, and the rage has reached the point at which some family members say MBS is at risk. ‘The Crown Prince gave our family a clear message: no one speaks about politics, I’m going to be king and everyone has to understand that they stay in line,’ said one prince. ‘Give it two or three months, and something will happen within the family against Mohammed bin Salman. I think they will plan against him.’ The detentions at the Ritz-Carlton may eventually prove to have been just the first shot in a deadly war.
