Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi billionaire with significant stakes in Citigroup Inc. and Twitter Inc., was arrested by Saudi Arabian authorities as part of an anti-corruption purge in the kingdom, according to a senior Saudi official.
Alwaleed was among 11 princes and 38 current or former senior officials that were arrested on orders from a newly established anti-corruption committee headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the official said, asking not to be identified.
Ranked the world’s 50th richest person with a net worth of about $19 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Alwaleed is the founder of Kingdom Holding Co., a Riyadh-based investment company in which the prince owns a 95 percent stake and that has holdings in real estate, hotels and stocks around the world. His wealth has declined by more than $700 million so far this year, according to the index.
The detention of Alwaleed, a nephew of King Salman, is surprising. The prince has, more than once, expressed his public support to the monarch and his son. When Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran in 2016, the prince said he was halting plans to invest in the Islamic Republic. Other changes announced separately in Saudi Arabia included the replacement of the economy minister and a new head for the powerful National Guard.
The Saudi official didn’t elaborate on allegations leading to Alwaleed’s arrest. A spokesman for the prince’s Kingdom Holding didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Alwaleed has long ranked among Citigroup’s largest and most outspoken shareholders, encouraging the investment bank to rebuild its Saudi Arabian business more than a decade after it lost a key banking license there. His Kingdom Holding has held the stock since 1991, according to its website, a span that included a 98 percent plunge during the financial crisis. The shares have since climbed more than sevenfold.
Read more: Citigroup gets Saudi investment bank license after 13 years
The investment firm has also tended significant stakes in Apple Inc. and EBay Inc. for well over a decade. While the website doesn’t specify the size of such holdings, Alwaleed’s investments are sometimes detailed in regulatory filings. At the end of last year, for example, he exercised voting rights for about 35 million shares of Twitter, most of which he owned directly, according to a February regulatory filing. As of Friday, a stake that size had a $695 million market value -- or almost 5 percent of the microblogging website’s total.
He’s also an investor in the Four Seasons hotel chain. In September, he agreed to buy a 16.2 percent stake in Banque Saudi Fransi from Credit Agricole SA in a deal valued at $1.54 billion, a discount after the French lender struggled to find an international buyer for the holding.
— With assistance by Matthew Martin.
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