The hearing examined the fund’s substantial holdings in the United States. It followed the announced merger in June 2023 of the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and LIV Golf, which is owned by the Saudi fund. Under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the fund has facilitated and benefitted from human rights abuses. The crown prince is chairman of the US$700 billion fund, which is built on the state’s oil wealth.
“Mohammed Bin Salman has shown a clear interest in expanding his influence beyond Saudi’s borders often through high-profile business deals with sports teams and leagues,” said Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “US businesses considering a handshake with Saudi’s PIF should undertake extremely rigorous due diligence to ensure that sovereign wealth funds that invest in US companies are not furthering human rights abuses.”
This raises serious concerns for US businesses engaging with the PIF, and any possible links this may create between them and abuses in Saudi Arabia and abroad, particularly as the fund expands its investments in key sectors of the US economy, including technology, sports, entertainment, and finance. This should also be a concern for US regulators and Congress, Human Rights Watch said.
Some sovereign wealth funds are structurally separate and distinct from a government’s chief executive. But the crown prince wields significant control over the PIF, one of the largest such funds in the world, and exercises unilateral decision-making with little transparency or accountability over the fund’s decisions. While Saudi Arabia’s state finances have long been characterized by a lack of transparency and oversight, the restructuring and dramatic expansion of the fund has consolidated – to an unprecedented degree – vast economic power in Saudi Arabia under the Crown Prince alone.
There has been no transparency regarding the asset seizure process. Some of the assets seized during the crackdown appear, according to The Guardian, to have been transferred to a holding company that is wholly owned by the PIF, apparently on the orders of Mohammed bin Salman. Other assets were reportedly transferred to a different government-controlled holding company managed by the Ministry of Finance. It is not clear who ultimately took ownership of the other assets.
Over the last several years, the Saudi government has embarked on a vast campaign to rehabilitate its image and deflect from the global perception of the Saudi state as a severe and persistent human rights violator, particularly under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The PIF, although an arm of the Saudi government and controlled by the country’s de facto leader, has sought to portray itself as an investor acting based on financial interests, rather than at the direction of the Crown Prince.
Saudi Arabia has hosted or sponsored events that celebrate human achievement, like major sporting events in the effort to improve its image. The fund is a central component of the country’s Vision 2030, which explicitly laid out the role of sports in enhancing the image of Saudi Arabia abroad.
On June 6, the PGA Tour announced an agreement combining the fund’s golf-related commercial businesses and rights, including LIV Golf, with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour into “a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.” Unlike the sponsorship of an event or ownership of a team, control over an entire sector of professional sports raises the possibility of pressuring players, sponsors, and media to stay silent on Saudi Arabia’s abuses, and raises concerns about what measures will be taken within the league to undermine human rights.
Human Rights Watch wrote to the PGA Tour’s Policy Board on June 22 detailing concerns about the implications of the fund effectively obtaining a monopoly over professional golf while it is also complicit in human rights abuses. As of September 13, Human Rights Watch had not received a response, nor are there indications that the tour has sought to develop a human rights strategy.
“It’s important that the US Congress is looking into the influence of the Saudi fund into US business,” Shea said. “The Biden administration should be taking similar cautions in its further engagement with the Saudi government, given its rights record and how it is using its billions to launder its image.”