Saudi Arabia Postpones Its Flagship Investment Conference
The Future Investment Initiative, due in Riyadh from 26 October and marking its tenth year, has been put back to 2027. Expected speakers included the heads of BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and the president of Alphabet. Government staff have been told to work from home until Thursday, and the tower housing the International Monetary Fund’s regional office has asked workers to stay away.
The organisers’ statement does not mention the attacks at all, citing a wish to deliver “the full scale, extraordinary quality, and unforgettable impact that our community has come to expect”; the connection is the obvious one rather than one they have drawn. What is not in doubt is how Riyadh is now being run. Residents received civil defence alerts of “a hostile aerial threat” on Monday, and firms in the main financial district have also sent staff home. A Houthi military spokesman claims six operations inside Saudi Arabia in forty-eight hours, naming Riyadh’s main airport, oil facilities at Yanbu, the Shaybah field and two air bases, and describing it as retaliation for more than two hundred Saudi strikes; there has been no Saudi comment and none of it is independently verified. Separately a missile strike on a security training camp in Shabwa province killed fifty-three people and injured more than two hundred on the provincial media office’s preliminary count, the only count available. Brent has climbed again this morning to just under $110, reversing most of yesterday's two per cent fall, and no approved source attributes the swing in either direction to a named cause.