Updated Oct. 20 at 10:22am EDT.
Journalists, investors, and some CEOs have pulled out of a three-day financial conference in Riyadh dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” after the Saudi government was accused of murdering Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The conference, which starts Oct. 23, promised to be a “blueprint for the twenty-second century.” It is hosted by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, and cosponsored by corporate giants like HSBC, Mastercard $MA, and Uber $UBER. Over 3,800 people have registered to come and nearly 200 speakers are expected.
The Saudi royal family controls the Saudi government, which has massive investments and substantial partnerships in everything from US universities to global oil companies to Washington, DC think tanks. Foreign companies and CEOs pulling out of the upcoming conference is a warning that they could cut other ties as well.
The conference’s program featured panelists and speakers by name until Friday morning, when they were wiped from the schedule. Many of the financial conference’s biggest sponsors have not dropped out, particularly the big international banks who do massive business with the Saudi family, and are “strategic partners” of the event. Neither have US officials.
Some CEOs had hoped to pressure the Saudi government into postponing the event by threatening not to attend, CNBC reported October 14. There’s a clutch of private equity firms and banks privately telling reporters their top brass won’t attend, but the companies have not put out any public statement.
This story has been updated multiple times with new cancellations.
Khashoggi, a one-time supporter of the Crown Prince who has turned carefully critical in his Washington Post columns, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, allege Turkish authorities. His body was dismembered there with a bone saw and removed in pieces, they say. The Saudi ambassador to the US told Axios that reports that “the Kingdom’s authorities have detained [Khashoggi] or killed him are absolutely false, and baseless.”
