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The Public Investment Fund and Salman S State The Political Drivers of Sovereign Wealth Management in Saudi Arabia
The Public Investment Fund and Salman S State The Political Drivers of Sovereign Wealth Management in Saudi Arabia
To cite this article: Alexis Montambault Trudelle (2023) The Public Investment Fund and
Salman’s state: the political drivers of sovereign wealth management in Saudi Arabia, Review of
International Political Economy, 30:2, 747-771, DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2022.2069143
ABSTRACT
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has grown from marginal player to the
most important economic actor in the Kingdom since 2015. Nevertheless, we know
surprisingly little about the political economy of the PIF revamp. Against an unfavor-
able macroeconomic backdrop, I argue that shifts in PIF organization and orientation
are fundamentally driven by the centralization of power within the circles of the
Saudi ruling family since the rise of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). The fund’s gov-
ernance framework and network of insiders forming the board of directors mirror
the concentration of authority around MBS. In turn, PIF domestic activities shifted
from scattered investment patterns associated with the competing influence of
senior decision-makers to a highly authoritative and personalized strategy. Moreover,
the PIF’s response to COVID-19 further exemplifies the turn from a conservative
strategy toward a short-term oriented approach to sovereign wealth management.
Going beyond macro-level economic and institutional dynamics, the article introdu-
ces the role of political agency in SWF choices by stressing how political actors and
the distribution of power within ruling elites shape SWFs. The article thus adds to
the scholarship on domestic drivers of SWFs and contributes to debates surrounding
the interplay between states and markets under processes of financialization.
KEYWORDS
sovereign wealth funds; elite politics; Saudi Arabia; Public Investment Fund
Introduction
On April 23, 2020, a virtual event of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) hosted
by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) brought together a group of global
investment experts to discuss the challenges of governance, macroeconomics and
technology associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the conference, Yasir
Othman Al-Rumayyan, governor of the PIF, discussed the SWF’s approach and
declared to the online audience: ‘You don’t want to waste a crisis … So for us, def-
initely we are looking into any opportunities’ (England & Massoudi, 2020). Two
weeks after the conference, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
filings disclosed that the PIF assumed stakes in multiple companies over the first
quarter (Q1) of 2020, growing the PIF’s portfolio of US-listed assets from $2.2 bil-
lion to $10.1 billion. However, as markets rebounded in the second quarter (Q2),
the PIF quickly exited most of its ventures in US-listed firms assumed over the pre-
vious quarter (SEC, 2020a, 2020b). The Saudi SWF reacted to the COVID-19 eco-
nomic shock not by following its stated strategy to invest with a low-risk and long-
term investment horizon but by opportunistically acquiring undervalued stocks in
developed markets to provide immediate returns. The PIF’s speculative shopping
spree amid the coronavirus outbreak is part of a broader strategic reorientation of
the fund’s activities since 2015.
The PIF was created in 1971 to support newly created state-owned enterprises but
ultimately remained a marginal player in the Kingdom. Since 2015, the fund is becom-
ing the single most important actor in Saudi Arabia’s economy and arguably the fast-
est-growing sovereign wealth fund (SWF) in the world. The PIF’s total assets under
management nearly quadrupled since 2015, growing from $150 billion to $580 billion
in 2022, making the fund as the 6th-largest (PIF, 2021; SWFI, 2022). Beyond the global
financial markets, the SWF established more than 30 firms in 10 sectors, including mili-
tary industries, power and utilities, real estate and tourism. The PIF is the centrepiece
of ambitious projects such as the $500 billion futuristic mega-city NEOM and the
Sudair Solar project, one of the world’s largest solar plants by capacity (ACWA Power,
2021; Scheck et al., 2019). The sovereign fund, which had around 40 employees in
2016, now has a staff count surpassing 1000 since 2020 (Azhar, 2020). Nevertheless, we
know surprisingly little about the political economy of the PIF revamp. Why did the
Saudi government significantly upgrade the PIF since 2015?
Since the global financial crisis and, more recently, the 2014 oil price crash, vari-
ous countries created sovereign development funds like the PIF to pursue economic
diversification and national industrial policy. In contrast to the predominant para-
digm of SWFs as primarily created to manage current account surpluses or com-
modity price booms (e.g. Aizenman & Glick, 2008; Al-Hassan et al., 2013; Das
et al., 2009), sovereign funds have increasingly become ‘demand-driven’, motivated
less by the need to capture and invest surplus wealth than by driving nation-build-
ing agendas (Dixon, 2022; Schena et al., 2018). Such trends bring the relationship
between domestic politics and SWF choices into sharp relief. Hence, a growing
body of work suggests that the logic driving SWFs is fundamentally political and
domestically oriented (Braunstein, 2017, 2019; Hatton & Pistor, 2011; Helleiner,
2009; Shih, 2009). However, whereas this literature acknowledges that state power
is closely tied to SWFs, we know little about how this relationship works; that is,
the concrete mechanisms of how political agency influences SWF decision-making.
From this perspective, the article takes on the Saudi case to develop the litera-
ture on domestic drivers of state investment funds by unpacking how political
actors, their interests and the distribution of power within the ruling elite carry sig-
nificant implications for SWFs’ choices. By analyzing both PIF’s institutional design
and investment initiatives, I argue that the concentration of political authority
moulds PIF choices as cross-temporal variation in institutional design and invest-
ment policy follows the change in state fragmentation. Without rejecting the quest
for risk-adjusted returns and a market-oriented logic at the firm level, the PIF’s
structure and investment strategy are enmeshed in elite politics characterized by a
centralization of royal authority around Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in the
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 749
family’s rule (Al-Rasheed, 2005; Herb, 1999). In that sense, Shih (2009) draws
attention to regime unity as the fundamental political dynamic shaping SWF deci-
sion-making. In a unified regime (when leadership change is unlikely), the leader-
ship’s perception of threat tends to decrease. Thus, SWFs may pursue long-term and
profit-maximization behavior. In contrast, in fragmented regimes where constitutional
procedures for leadership transition are vague, SWFs tend to become tools of survival.
While SWFs might be institutionalized enough to pursue market-oriented returns,
’there may be a preference for short-term advantages gained through managing an
SWF, whether it be quick profit or a way to pay off a politically powerful actor’
(Shih, 2009, p. 331). However, managers may opt for a conservative approach to miti-
gate investment losses and avoid exclusion in the event of a shift in leadership.
Building upon such existing literature, this article conceptualises SWFs as
byproducts of interactions, contested or otherwise, between various political
forces that shape decisions regarding the management and allocation of sovereign
wealth. It has been argued that the interplay between conflicts and coalitions
among a small number of princes and commoners within circles of the royal fam-
ily and institutional change at previous historical junctures shaped the form of
the modern Saudi state. During the state’s expansion of the 1950s and 1960s,
princes were provided with roles and portfolios according to seniority while satis-
fying their ambitions. Institutions were often adjusted to the authority and status
of the agent leading them or even created from scratch to strenghten or under-
mine specific players (Hertog, 2010b; Yizraeli, 1998). In the same way, it is
received wisdom in historical institutionalism that shifts in socioeconomic con-
texts or the political balance of power can generate a situation in which old insti-
tutions are put in the service of different ends as new actors come into play and
pursue their (new) goals through existing institutions. At certain definitive
moments in history, institutions can be created or expanded to give the agent an
advantage in games of power (Collier & Collier, 1991; Thelen & Steinmo, 1992).
The theoretical point of departure here is that variation in SWF form and func-
tion can, to a large extent, be explained by shifts in intra-elite political dynamics.
Nonetheless, the agency of political actors over SWF choices in existing
approaches is largely obscured by analysis of organizing features of aggregates
including ‘state’ and ‘regime’. Hence, even if IPE scholarship acknowledges that
state power and SWF choices are intimately related, we need a microfoundation
of how domestic politics influence SWF decision-making.
My proposal is to disaggregate the state for a finer-grained analysis of sover-
eign wealth management. This logic suggests distinguishing how political agency
(the players, their interests, and the distribution of power among them) and
dynamics of political contexts within historical institutional constraints shape
SWF design and use. Hence, I approach the shift in the PIF’s trajectory using a
historical-institutional analytical framework. The article first unpacks the histor-
ical political legacies and shifts within the circles of the Saudi political elite fol-
lowing the 2015 regime change. Then, through a chronological research design,
the article reviews the PIF pre- and post-2015 governance framework (organiza-
tional design, management and responsibilities) and investment strategy (time
horizon, asset classes and risk appetite) to explore how the shift in the political
balance of power since 2015 affected the fund.
752 A. MONTAMBAULT TRUDELLE
while Ma’aden is among the ten largest mining companies judged by market capit-
alization (BrandFinance, 2021; Ma’aden, 2020). The PIF also provided various loans
to the state-owned Petromin, a national oil company established in 1962 to replace
the US-owned Aramco. For instance, the PIF attributed approximately $1 billion in
loans to facilitate the construction of the East-West Crude Oil pipeline
(McPherson-Smith, 2021). Petromin eventually fell from grace between 1983 and
1986, Aramco assumed control over the company between 1993 and 1996 and the
company was dissolved in 2005 (Hertog, 2008). Beyond non-oil diversification
objectives, the contrasting PIF ventures in Petromin and SABIC reveal how earlier
investments were intertwined with rivalries and coalitions among high-level elite
players, technocrats and a network of key merchant families.
The PIF-backed Petromin was under technocrats fostered by King Faisal (1964-
1975): the oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani and his right-hand man Abdulhadi
Taher, Petromin’s governor (Vitalis, 2007). Petromin became the primary vehicle
for industrialization with activities encompassing oil refineries in the Kingdom and
abroad, oil and gas exploration, glass and steel plants, power generation projects,
distribution of refined products within Saudi Arabia and even its own shipping
operations (Hertog, 2008). Following the death of Faisal in 1975, crown prince
Fahd was given great administrative liberty by new King Khaled (1975-1982) and
thus sought to foster technocrats closer to him than Yamani and Taher. The newly
established Ministry of Industry and Electricity (MOIE) under Fahd’s client, Ghazi
al-Gosaibi, restricted Petromin’s activity as the MOIE took control of petrochemi-
cals, mining, and other heavy industries. Large numbers of Petromin projects were
transferred to the MOIE to be evaluated by the Industrial Studies and
Development Center under the eye of Abdulaziz Zamil. Every Petromin project
was reformulated or dismissed. Then, the MOIE established SABIC in 1976 to con-
solidate control over petrochemicals and other heavy industry projects. SABIC was
capitalized at $2.8 billion, with 70% coming from the PIF, with Gosaibi standing as
chairman and Zamil as CEO (Hertog, 2008).
The fund’s earlier investments in Petromin and SABIC reflect a political land-
scape consisting of overlapping bureaucratic strongholds acting as veto players in
decision-making, each controlled by factions of the ruling family and their related
networks infiltrating the state apparatus and the economy. In this vein, PIF activ-
ities were subject to a constellation of distinct and competing political forces lead-
ing to reactive and scattered investment patterns. Between 1971 and 2015, the PIF
played a central role in some of the most ambitious and successful state-led eco-
nomic development projects but ultimately displayed uncoordinated and targeted
investment patterns related to the fragmented regime structure.
From 1971 to 2015, the PIF had been relegated to domestic investments, while
the country’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA), was
the central agency in charge of managing and investing Saudi sovereign wealth.
SAMA was created in 1952 as US advisor Arthur N. Young convinced King
Abdulaziz (1932-1953) and Abdullah Sulaiman, the King’s close advisor and
finance minister, of the need for banking and monetary regulations (A. N. Young,
1983). Following its creation, SAMA’s charter and the use of foreign technocrats,
based on a claim that no Saudis would have had the required training, strength-
ened its autonomy. In contrast to other agencies, SAMA was insulated from the
regular civil service structures and possessed distinct payment and recruitment
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 755
mechanisms (Hertog, 2010b; A. N. Young, 1983). SAMA managed two strictly sep-
arated portfolios: a reserve portfolio to manage the liquidity requirements of a cen-
tral bank and an investment portfolio with a stabilization mandate under SAMA
Foreign Holdings. SAMA displayed a passive investment strategy with the majority
of its portfolio invested in highly liquid and low-risk assets, mainly US Treasury
bonds (Banafe & Macleod, 2017; Bazoobandi, 2013)1. A significant portion of its
assets was short-term oriented, reflecting a conservative investment orientation to
satisfy the demands for liquidity and safety (Alsweilem et al., 2015; Banafe &
Macleod, 2017).
Furthermore, multiple ministries and other state agencies possessed their own for-
eign investment vehicles, each with their own investment strategy, whereas several
ministers embedded their private investment funds within the overall structure of
ministries2. In this sense, Smith Diwan’s (2009) study of the creation of Sanabil-al-
Saudia in 2008 shows how Saudi Arabia’s first attempt at creating an official SWF
was predominantly driven by King Abdullah’s (2005-2015) attempt to subdue intra-
state rivalries and manage the Kingdom’s fragmented investment activities.
Nevertheless, the fund rapidly fell from grace in the face of sustained interagency
disputes and was subsequently absorbed by the PIF (Sanabil Investment, 2020).
From 1971 to 2015, sovereign wealth management under SAMA was associated with
a conservative international investment orientation. The institutional fragmentation
of the Saudi political landscape created interference in establishing a coherent
national investment strategy and a separate government-owned investment vehicle
acting as a distinct sovereign fund operating across the global financial markets.
2018; SoftBank Group, 2020). On a more informal level, Al-Rumayyan began his
career as a local banker but began to appear as a key member of MBS’s inner circle
in 2015 (Davidson, 2021; Hope & Scheck, 2020). Al-Rumayyan is an advisor to the
Royal Court and the General Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers.
To support the expansion of PIF activities, the initial staff of around 40 employ-
ees grew to 450 in 2019 and surpassed 1000 by the end of 2020 (Argaam, 2020;
Azhar, 2020). Insulated from the regular civil service’s employment structures more
conducive to patronage, the fund has its own competitive recruitment process and
remuneration structures. Nonetheless, competence has been highlighted as a signifi-
cant issue in many Gulf SWFs (Clark & Monk, 2012). The PIF launched its
Academy for Training and Development in partnership with HEC Paris, the
University of California Berkeley and AMT Training (PIF, 2021). This strives to
build the skillset of local employees either going into junior or senior positions to
drive the PIF’s increasingly sophisticated investment activities efficiently.
However, the governance structure is still conducive to influence from MBS
over day-to-day operations and promotes his grip on the mechanisms to fill senior
management positions through his ascendency over the board of directors and his
position as chairman of the Executive and Remuneration Committees. Reports
from late December 2018 and March 2020 show that various senior expatriate PIF
executives (including two heads of strategy, head of legal, head of risk, chief of
public investments, and private-equity associate) resigned and issued remarks on
the lack of analysis and consultation in addition to the micromanagement of MBS.
For instance, Eric Ebermeyer left in 2018 just weeks after joining as the fund’s
head of strategy, bemoaning MBS’s micromanagement, unclear strategy and an
unstable work environment. Cyrille Urfer followed Ebermeyer. Urfer led the PIF’s
investments in global public markets and hedge funds but claimed that ‘ideas and
deals are driven from the top down’ (Jones, 2018). In a further statement, he
added: ‘at the end of the day, the owner and the one who takes the decision is the
Saudi government, and the PIF is the tool that is supervising the execution of these
projects’ (Azhar & Kalin, 2019).
Nevertheless, proximity to the ruling group does not automatically lead to
inefficiency. The successes of Gulf state-owned enterprises (SOEs) like the SABIC
and SAMA in relation to other rentier states are attributed, among other things,
to their form of ’pockets of efficiency’, or in other terms, their autonomy associ-
ated with the direct protection of high-level unified principals in the ruling
group. Being insulated from the rest of the state apparatus, high-ranking techno-
cratic managers reporting directly to the ruler, crown prince or other senior roy-
als can focus on market-oriented management outside of political and
bureaucratic predation from senior bureaucrats and minor royals (Hertog,
2010a). Nonetheless, the PIF does not enjoy substantial decisional autonomy
from the regime leadership, a fundamental determinant of pockets of efficiency.
The concentration of royal authority around the crown prince from 2015
prompted a process of centralization among decision-making structures around a
closely knit coalition of senior royals and technocrats reflected in the PIF’s gov-
ernance structure. SWF institutional design appears as an instrument of legitim-
acy and control as much as an attempt to consolidate the appropriate governance
of sovereign wealth management.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 757
political and economic power within the circles of the Saudi ruling family since the
rise of MBS. Can this turn in institutional design and investment initiatives be pri-
marily explained by factors linked to regime structure? What about international
factors? Authors like Aizenman and Glick (2008), Das et al. (2009) see sovereign
development funds in commodity-exporting countries like the Saudi PIF as mainly
driven by macroeconomic indicators. The focus is on sustained fiscal budget or
current account surpluses following a resource boom in addition to challenges of
economic diversification. While the PIF’s expansion appears coherent considering
Saudi Arabia’s need for greater economic diversification10, a cursory look at macro-
economic trends illustrates how the SWF’s revamp took place in an age of scarcity
characterized by falling oil prices, growing public debt, sustained budget deficits
and increasing demographic pressures.
In 2014 the oil market turned and sent Brent prices tumbling from $98.97 in 2014
to $41.96 in 2020 (EIA, 2021). This drop in oil prices directly affected the Saudi oil-
dependent state revenues, which declined twofold between 2013 and 2016 to reach
72% of their pre-oil shock level in 2020. In contrast to a sharp decline in revenues,
government expenditures decreased much more slowly. As a result, the Saudi govern-
ment has been experiencing sustained fiscal deficits since 2014 (Figure 1). The public
debt rose by 221% in 2015, 123% in 2016 and continued to grow between 40% and
21% until 2019 (Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, 2017, 2020).
In addition, the last Saudi demographic survey (2016) exposes how of the 20.1
million Saudi nationals, 49% were under the age of 25, and 30% were under
15 years of age (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2016). In 2016 the total sum of Saudi
nationals was more than eight times the size of any Gulf country (Gulf Research
Center, 2016). Consequently, the available sovereign wealth per citizen in 2017 was
$422 in Kuwait, $1,043 in Qatar and $1,085 in the UAE, while it stood at $42 per
Saudi citizen (Gross & Ghafar, 2019). The dual prospects of a growing number of
Saudis entering the labor market and a steady decline in resource revenues chal-
lenge the sustainability of the Saudi distributive state built mainly around large-
scale public employment, social transfers, and heavily subsidized public utilities.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 763
For instance, in 2015, the government reported that salary and allowance expendi-
tures alone exceeded total oil income (Hertog, 2018). Macroeconomic trends
underscore the paradoxical disconnect between the Kingdom’s dire fiscal situation
and the PIF’s significant expansion since 2015.
The Kingdom’s deteriorating fiscal circumstances also directly affect the PIF
funding source highly dependent on oil income. Sovereign development funds like
the PIF often raise capital through bond issuance to support their investment pro-
gram (Schena & Chaturvedi, 2011). Rather than issuing bonds considering short-
falls in resources revenues, the PIF shows an increasing appetite for private debt.
The SWF opted to tap international banks to secure an $11 billion loan in 2018
and a $10 billion loan in 2019 (Abdellatif, 2019; Afanasieva, 2018). Then in March
2021, the PIF announced a $15 billion multicurrency revolving credit facility with
17 international banks (Saudi Press Agency, 2021c). Private loans allow the fund to
avoid the scrutiny and various constraints associated with disclosure and issuing
requirements of bonds but also illustrate a turn towards a more short-term
approach to sovereign wealth management.
Another common assumption is that countries with geographical and cultural
proximity, similar export profiles and exposed to similar external pressures will
adopt similar SWF types and behaviour either through a process of cross-national
emulation (e.g. Chwieroth 2014) or shared macroeconomic characteristics
(Aizenman & Glick, 2008; Das et al., 2009; Lee, 2007). Consistent with this diffu-
sion-based hypothesis (Chwieroth, 2014) Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi
have indeed established SWFs with a development mandate when confronted with
similar challenges, namely industrial upgrading or economic diversification.
However, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain’s sovereign development funds were launched in
2002 and 2006, coinciding with the oil boom of the early 2000s. Saudi Arabia
became the last Gulf country to set up an SWF with a development mandate in
2015, a period counterintuitively characterized by a dramatic fall in state revenues
and considerable fiscal deficits.
Moreover, one finds that Saudi Arabia’s SWF varies more than in context of
establishment but also in terms of strategic orientation, as previously demonstrated
by the discrepancy between the PIF’s speculative approach and Mubadala’s more
patient response to the COVID-19 shock. In addition, Mubadala carries the reputa-
tion of a reliable multi-year investor and the Gulf’s most professional state invest-
ment vehicle; the fund was Global SWF’s 2021 fund of year and also takes part in
the IFSWF’s self-assessment and transparency initiatives (Global SWF, 2022). Can
factors linked to distinct regime dynamics explain this variation between the two
Gulf SWFs? Despite sharing many similarities in terms of macroeconomic features,
most notably dependence on oil revenues and exposure to external pressures like
commodity cycles, the UAE has the most diversified economy in the GCC, and
Abu Dhabi has most of the UAE’s oil wealth (Gross & Ghafar, 2019). Besides, the
total sum of UAE nationals (including Abu Dhabi and other emirates) of 950 368
in 2016 contrasts the 20.1 million Saudi nationals (Gulf Research Center, 2016;
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 2016). As a high-rent country, the emirate is thus in a
much stronger macroeconomic position than a low-rent Saudi Arabia. Therefore,
under the assumption of SWFs as driven by macro-level indicators, Mubadala,
rather than the PIF, emerges as the SWF in a better position to implement a more
764 A. MONTAMBAULT TRUDELLE
aggressive and riskier investment policy based on higher sovereign wealth per cap-
ita and a superior macroeconomic position.
At the socio-political level, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi share similarities in con-
centration of authority, state autonomy, and power distribution in state-business rela-
tions. Like MBS, Muhammad bin Zayed Al-Nahyan (MBZ), crown prince and de
facto ruler of Abu Dhabi and the UAE since 2004, side-lined previously influential
officials or senior ruling elite members and concentrated power in the hands of
trusted relatives or within a small circle of technocrats. For instance, Khaldun Al-
Mubarak, known as MBZ’s closest associate, is entrusted with various significant eco-
nomic and political portfolios but is also the renowned managing director of
Mubadala (Davidson, 2021). Much like the PIF and MBS, Mubadala is chaired by
MBZ and was established to drive Abu Dhabi’s diversification efforts towards tech-
nology-focused activities, mainly in aerospace, electronics and defense. While major
institutions are under MBZ’s grasp or his inner circle, the crown prince also consoli-
dated his authority over the business elite mainly through anti-corruption campaigns.
In addition, institutions of business representation enjoy a low degree of autonomy
and limited political strength (Braunstein, 2019; Davidson, 2021). The design and
working logic underpinning SWFs is a multi-faceted and complex issue. Nonetheless,
against a backdrop of counterintuitive macroeconomic trends and in contrast with
an SWF embedded in comparable socio-political dynamics, the PIF’s revamp and
shift towards a more aggressive and wide-ranging investment strategy appears as fun-
damentally driven by distinct regime dynamics following the 2015 regime change.
Conclusion
Beyond the logic of SWFs as outcomes of macro-level trends, the political dimen-
sion underlying the PIF’s reconfiguration is crucial to understanding SWF develop-
ment in Saudi Arabia. More specifically, the article demonstrates how the
concentration of royal authority and power politics within the family following the
accession of King Salman and the rise of MBS drove the shift in the PIF’s post-
2015 institutional design and investment initiatives. The outcome was a shift from
scattered and uncoordinated investment patterns associated with interagency feuds
and the influence of competing senior decision-makers to a personalized and highly
interventionist strategy driven by a tightly knit group of regime insiders evolving
around the crown prince.
The connection between PIF choices, elite politics, and reshuffle at the top-level
of the Saudi state apparatus following the rise of MBS illustrate that despite theor-
etical efforts to depoliticize SWF design and use, the personal ambition of political
agents and their political network carry weight in choices relating to sovereign
wealth management. In line with patterns in the Kingdom’s state formation since
the 1950s (Hertog, 2010b; Yizraeli, 1998), institutional initiatives are often tokens
of authority in an intra-elite power game as much as attempts at modernizing or
reforming the state. The PIF is yet another reminder of how competing interests
and coalitions between senior royals and technocrats can shape the trajectory of
the Saudi state at historical junctures.
These findings have implications for research on drivers of sovereign invest-
ments in IPE more broadly. While Thatcher and Vlandas (2016) underline the
growing role of SWFs as allocators of long term capital, Lerner and Ivashina
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 765
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Ewan Stein, Charlotte Rommerskirchen, Lucy Abbott and the
anonymous referees for helpful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. SAMA does not provide any currency breakdown of foreign exchange reserves.
Nevertheless, in 2008, SAMA was believed to hold 85% of its foreign exchange reserve in
US$(Bazoobandi, 2013).
766 A. MONTAMBAULT TRUDELLE
2. Smith Diwan (2009) judged that 50 to 60 government agencies were involved in foreign
investment activities.
3. Data on the Saudi bank sector’s market share as of Q1-2020 (Aljazira Capital, 2020b).
4. Data on shareholders from Tadawul as of January 2022.
5. Data from Tadawul as of January 2022.
6. Data on directors and shareholders from Tadawul, Capital IQ, publicly available data
from LinkedIn and Hanieh’s (2018) extensive work on Gulf conglomerates.
7. FDI net inflows data from the World Bank as of January 15, 2021, https://data.
worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?end=2019&locations=SA&start=2008&
view=chart
8. The global CEOs and finance officials who dubbed the event include Stephen
Schwarzman (CEO of Blackstone), Christine Lagarde (then director of the IMF), Jamie
Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase), AOL’s founder Steve Case, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser,
Blackrock and Uber CEOs Larry Fink and Dara Khosrowshahi, Virgin CEO Richard
Branson, and Bill Ford of Ford Motor (Alkhalisi, 2018; BBC, 2018; Stanley-Becker, 2018).
9. Statement from email communications between PIF officials and Abu Dhabi’s daily, The
National News (Kamel, 2020).
10. From 2000 to 2019, oil income averaged 81,4% of total state revenues (SAMA
annual reports).
Notes on contributor
Alexis Montambault Trudelle is a doctoral candidate in Politics and International Relations at the
University of Edinburgh.
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