The escalating scandal over the alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has sent reverberations throughout the financial world, which has relied on investments from the oil-rich kingdom for decades.
The Saudi government’s suspected role in the death of Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, has led a number of Western institutions to pull out of this week’s big investment conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — as has Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
But not Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital.
Scaramucci told Institutional Investor that SkyBridge will still be sending representatives to the Future Investment Initiative, the investment conference that launched last year and has been billed as the “Davos of the Desert,” this week. He confirmed that Saudis are also investors in SkyBridge.
“I support the @realDonaldTrump moves related to @SaudiEmbassyUSA and my team from @SkyBridge will be at the Riyadh summit,” he tweeted on Oct. 18. “Reform and progress is needed and that really only comes through engagement.”
In an email to II on Friday, Scaramucci added that “Skybridge isn’t a political organization. We have been doing business in the Middle East for 14 years and we are meeting clients there that have nothing to do with the incident.”
On Monday, the website for the conference — which is slated to start Tuesday — was apparently hacked, Newsweek reported, showing a photo of its home page with a photoshopped image of Khashoggi facing execution by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Scaramucci’s original tweet was before Trump shifted his stance on the Khashoggi case, as more credible details of the Washington Post columnist’s suspected torture, murder, and dismemberment began to leak into the media, in Turkey and the U.S.
On Friday night the Saudi government acknowledged Khashoggi’s death for the first time and said it had arrested 18 individuals suspected of being involved in the killing. The Saudis said the death resulted from a “fistfight” inside the consulate, although that claim was refuted by U.S. intelligence, according to various reports.
A day earlier Trump had said he believed Khashoggi was dead, and that he had confidence in intelligence reports suggesting “a high-level Saudi role in his assassination,” the New York Times reported.
“Trump stopped short of saying the Saudi crown prince … was responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s death,” the Times reported. “But he acknowledged that the allegations that the prince ordered the killing raised hard questions about the American alliance with Saudi Arabia and had ignited one of the most serious foreign policy crises of his presidency.”
The statements came during an interview with the Times in the Oval Office, in which it reported Trump saying “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately. It’s not a positive. Not a positive.”
After that statement, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin announced he would not attend the investment conference.
On Friday, Trump told reporters that sanctions against Saudi Arabia, a longtime American ally that also buys weapons from the U.S. arms industry, are possible. Later, in contrast to the U.S. intelligence assessment, he also said the Saudi explanation for the killing is “credible.”
However, on Sunday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he will soon reveal “the full nakedness” of what happened. Another new detail emerged on Monday, when CNN aired video footage — which it said was leaked from a Turkish source — that appeared to show a “body double,” wearing the clothing Khashoggi was wearing, leaving the embassy after the murder.
More than two dozen top officials and executives from the United States and Europe are reportedly boycotting the Riyadh conference. Among the U.S. executives who’ve pulled out are JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and Blackstone Group’s Steve Schwarzman. Goldman Sachs executive Dina Powell, a former advisor in the Trump administration, will not be going either, according to CEO David Solomon.
So far, none of the financial institutions have cut their financial ties with the kingdom. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund is a big investor throughout the U.S., in hedge funds, private equity, real estate, and the public markets.
But some observers predict that a divestment campaign is coming.
“People are going to have to divest. Universities are going to have to divest; state funds are going to have to divest,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, predicted on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on October 18.
