Ritz-Carlton Crackdown Still Haunts the New Saudi Arabia
A climate of fear permeates the kingdom months after the government’s corruption purge.
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The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh, where hundreds of rich and once-powerful Saudis were detained in what the government called an anti-corruption campaign, has been a hotel again for four months. Its legacy as a jail, though, runs deep in the new Saudi Arabia.
Billionaires, royals and bureaucrats remain locked up, including Prince Turki bin Abdullah and former Economy Minister Adel Fakeih, a key architect of the kingdom’s transformation plan, according to associates. Some are now in the Al-Ha’er prison, a maximum-security facility south of the capital where many Islamic militants are incarcerated.