Saudi ownership under scrutiny

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/03/2023 (1249 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Could LIV Golf’s U.S.-based lawyers have accidentally jeopardized the ownership of Newcastle United?

As part of an ongoing legal scrap between LIV and the PGA, documents filed Tuesday in a San Francisco court described Yasir Al-Rumayyan as “a sitting minister of the Saudi government.” LIV’s legal team was merely trying to block a deposition of Al-Rumayyan, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that owns the tour, but they seem to have placed the Premier League club under fresh scrutiny in the process.

The PIF, you see, also owns Newcastle, and it’s only allowed the privilege so long as it’s not subjected to government interference. Having a chairman who doubles as a sitting minister quite obviously contravenes the Fund’s agreement with the Premier League, whose other clubs are none too pleased (with the likely exception of Manchester City).

OK great, but the PIF literally exists to serve the state. And, to be fair, it’s never made a secret of it’s raison d’être. Not now, not more than 50 years ago when it was established by royal decree. It is, according to its website, a “national economic tributary,” and it has every right to be so.

A one-minute internet search (actually less) revealed that information, which is widely known anyway. As it did the official confirmation of Al-Rumayyan’s government role as Advisor to the General Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers, which has also never been a mystery.

So, how is it that only this week the Premier League membership, that fortress of conscience and morality, learned of a deceiver in their midst?

Spoiler: they didn’t.

In launching their counter-suit last month, the PGA repeated the almost universally-held assertion that the PIF’s purpose with LIV was, and is, to “sportwash the recent history of Saudi atrocities.”

On Thursday, the economic affairs director of Amnesty International UK, Peter Frankental, stated that “to imagine that the Saudi state wasn’t directing the buyout of Newcastle United with the ultimate aim of using the club as a component in its wider sportwashing efforts” was “stretching credulity to breaking point.”

He added: “In the 18 months since the Newcastle purchase, the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia has deteriorated markedly, with scores of executions after unfair trials, courts jailing peaceful critics, and the authorities continuing to block accountability for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.”

It’s one thing to be scolded by Amnesty. It’s another entirely to be out-moralized by professional golf.

Then there’s Premier League chief executive Richard Masters’ own comments to the BBC in November 2021, shortly after the PIF’s takeover of the club, in which he underlined the terms of the transaction.

“There are legally-binding assurances that the state will not be in control of the club,” he said. “If we find evidence to the contrary we can remove the consortium as owners of the club in accordance with the rules. That is understood.”

And it probably is. Unfortunately for Masters, Al-Rumayyan, the PIF and even the Premier League, which benefits from whatever money enters its ecosystem, people found out about it. So the league’s membership, at least, is compelled to feign shock and put on an aura of disappointment.

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That, or none among them knew how to do a Google search two years ago, or, more cynically, were wilfully blind to the Saudi kingdom’s entry into their midst.

What’s more likely, however, is that neither scenario is true. No, Masters and the Premier League, nevermind their PIF partners, likely hoped no one would notice. Or, when they did, that there wouldn’t be sufficient pressure, or conscience, to act on an agreement that supposedly exists.

They can blame LIV’s lawyers for the first part. The guilty always seem to find a way to tell on themselves. As to the second part, the jury’s still out.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

Twitter @JerradPeters