Natural selection
The head of the world’s largest and most ambitious construction project has stepped down amid shocking claims about the death toll.
Like the Wall Street Journal According to reports, Nadhmi al-Nasr, the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city project Neom – which includes The Line, a planned pair of skyscrapers spanning 100 miles – has abruptly left the role he has held since 2018. This exit comes after a new one Channel 3 documentary claimed that more than 21,000 foreign workers had died during construction, a figure that does not even appear to include the number of indigenous people displaced and disappeared during Neom’s construction.
Sources familiar with the board shake-up confirmed to the newspaper that he had left the position in recent days, although it remains unclear exactly why the Neom CEO left and whether it was related to the recent allegations.
In an email viewed by the WJNeom’s board has appointed Aiman ​​al-Mudaifer, a real estate manager at the Saudi kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, as al-Nasr’s successor. In that email, Neom’s governing body said the move was a “strategic decision by the Board of Directors and a natural evolution.”
Behind the budget
As the specter of all those deaths hangs over the project, insiders involved with the WJ said that the Public Investment Fund is now stepping in to take over the project, which seems very difficult to implement, after repeated delays and increasing budgets.
An experienced builder, Al-Nasr oversaw the construction of both a giant oil field for the kingdom’s oil company Aramco and a university complex that jutted out against the Red Sea.
But Neom’s mind-boggling planned scope – which, in addition to its 100 miles of skyscrapers, will also include a football stadium for the kingdom’s 2026 World Cup bid, a desert ski resort and a floating business district – far exceeds it all. on the ex-CEO’s resume.
As the paper’s sources note, two of Neom’s other top executives, a pair of Westerners who were the subjects of a WJ corruption expose earlier this year, have also left their positions in recent months. Taken together, these departures suggest that the Saudis are busy cleaning houses — and that the people who died to get there may matter less than the kingdom’s profits.
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