Saudis' $190 Billion in Promises to Trump Never Materialized

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose nearly $200 billion in promises to President Donald Trump have not happened, will visit the United States next week in a bid to attract foreign investment to Saudi Arabia.

The crown prince's tour will include a meeting with Trump on Tuesday. The week's tour will also include meetings with Silicon Valley tech leaders, Texas oil industry officials, entertainment executives in Los Angeles, and key people in the financial industry in New York, reports The Washington Post.

Bin Salman hopes to diversify the Saudi economy, which relies mostly on oil exports.

Meanwhile, last May, when Trump visited Riyadh, he touted approximately $190 billion of commercial and military agreements with the Saudi kingdom, but for the most part they have not happened, as American investors are wary about investing in Saudi Arabia, reports The Post.

The list of transactions included $110 billion in military deals and another $80 billion of commercial sales, according to a spreadsheet The Post obtained from a White House official.

Some had been first proposed during the Obama administration, and many of the deals included only letters of intent or memorandums of understanding that were not solid offers.

A $28 billion deal for technology and programs from Lockheed Martin was among the largest of the plans. However, Maureen Schumann, a spokeswoman at the company, said the agreements are still "working their way through the approval processes in both governments."

The State Department notified Congress in October that it approved a selling the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile system to the Saudis for $15 billion, but no solid contracts have yet been reached.

“What the Saudis and the administration did is put together a notional package of the Saudi wish list of possible deals and portray that as a deal,” Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a blog post, notes The Post.“Even then the numbers don’t add up. It’s fake news.”

Part of the delay has been blamed on Sen. Bob Corker, R-S.C., who objected to the sales of military equipment to countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Saudi Arabia. But in February, Corker wrote to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that he had lifted his objection.

Further, a Corker aide said that the Saudi portion represented less than three percent of the sales announced last May.

The investments may have been hindered in part because of bin Salman's ordered arrests last November of dozens of princes, senior military officers, businessmen and top officials, including a well-known royal billionaire with extensive holdings in Western companies, conducted while the crown prince said he was fighting corruption in his country.

The detained people have been released from custody in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton, after the Saudi government was able obtain billions of dollars and business enterprises from them.

“The crown prince needs to do some reassuring of the international business and financial communities in the wake of the Ritz Carlton detentions of last year,” F. Gregory Gause, a professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University, told The Post. “He needs international investment to achieve his Vision 2030 goals, and the opaque way he dealt with the businesspeople and others he detained raised questions about security of investment in the kingdom.”

Before that, Saudi Arabia already had a reputation of being difficult to deal with when doing business, and even the lobbyists and lawyers who have signed on to help complain that working with Saudi officials and the numerous regulations that come in to play is not easy.