In 2007, Prince Mohammed graduated fourth in his class from King Saud University with a bachelor’s degree in law. Then the kingdom came knocking. He resisted at first, telling the director of the Bureau of Experts, which serves as the cabinet’s legal adviser, that he was off to get married, earn a master’s degree overseas, and make his fortune. But his father urged him to give the government a chance, and Prince Mohammed did so for two years, focusing on changing certain corporate laws and regulations that “I had always struggled with.”
His boss, Essam bin Saeed, says the prince showed a restless intellect and no patience for bureaucracy. “Procedures that used to take two months, he’d ask for them in two days,” says Saeed, who now works as a minister of state. “Today, it’s one day.”
In 2009, King Abdullah refused to approve Prince Mohammed’s promotion, in theory to avoid the appearance of nepotism. A bitter Prince Mohammed left and went to work for his father, then governor of Riyadh. He stepped into a viper’s nest. As Prince Mohammed tells it, he tried to streamline procedures to keep his father from drowning in a sea of paperwork, and the old guard rebelled. They accused the young prince of usurping power by cutting off their contact with his father and took their complaints to King Abdullah. In 2011, King Abdullah named Prince Salman defense minister but ordered Prince Mohammed never to set foot inside the ministry.
The prince worried his career was over. “I’m saying to myself, ‘I’m in my 20s, I don’t know how I fell into more than one trap,’ ” he says. But given how things have turned out, he’s grateful. “It’s only by coincidence I started working with my father—all because of King Abdullah’s decision not to grant my promotion. God bless his soul, he did me a favor.”
Source: The $2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy Off Oil – Bloomberg
I liked what I read in this article… At least what they said. Now I want to hear a bit about what they silenced.
Especially concerning the future religious and political influence of Saudi wealth in the globe. Because BOTH are already affecting us all.
Religious influence is felt in Europe, where most imams in the newly opened mosques are salafists, many formed in Riyadh and other hard-line and wahabbi-styled schools. Deffinitely not the kind of doctrine to support mix and integration but confrontation and social inestability.
Political influence is felt in the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees we have at our door asking for a chance… after Saudis, Qataris and Turks fuelled one of the sides of the Syrian civil war, not in the aim to bring freedom and democracy to Syrians, but to impose a strict Sunni regime. Exactly the opposite f what the other side and its supports would never accept.
So… there’s still a lot to expect and many more news to check but… at least what they said… is not bad.
Time will tell. As always did.
Al-Must'arib (the vocational Mossarab) 