You Can’t Expect Dan Loeb To Overlook Both The Reporter’s Severed Limbs In A Suitcase AND No Wine

Wall Street has, after a brief pause of pretense, made clear that the dispatch and dismemberment of a dissident journalist on diplomatic premises is no barrier to doing business with it, especially if you have trillions of dollars in oil money literally flowing up from the ground. Why, the titans of finance—many of whom when on this side of the planet pretend to care deeply about matters of free speech to excuse their support for dangerously senile and suggestive old rapist—are so unbothered by such bloodshed as to be willing—unhappily, but all the same—to be mildly inconvenienced at the hotel when their onetime connection ‘round these parts was once imprisoned and god only knows what else for a chance to meet with the man who seems in all probability to have ordered the grisly hit.

[Marc] Rowan, clad in a neat suit rather than his usual sweaters, was 11 minutes early — he actually doubled back a few times, apparently unwilling to arrive first — but was soon followed by a dozen or so titans of technology and finance, including top executives of the Carlyle Group, BlackRock, Citi and Standard Chartered, and founders of the giant hedge funds Bridgewater Associates and Third Point.

Once amassed, they were whisked en masse by Saudi security to a dinner in Diriyah, the ancestral home of the al-Saud family, at the farm of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman — who was accused of organizing the murder of a dissident journalist six years earlier, and of the imprisonment, torture and shakedown of his own family members during what his government called an anticorruption operation in this very same Ritz.

There is, however, one thing men such as these cannot abide, and that, apparently, is going more than a few hours without a drink.

Though consumption of alcohol is officially forbidden in the country, there were myriad workarounds for the visiting finance set.

Several attendees spoke of piling into four-wheelers for trips into the desert, where booze was readily available at the private compounds of prominent local families and government-connected investors. One venture capitalist boasted that he had stuck around a party drinking lukewarm camel-milk tea out of gold cups until the stroke of midnight — when a side door was dramatically opened to reveal a staffed bar with whiskey shots.

Contraband Whiskey and a Secret Royal Dinner: Wall Street Goes to Riyadh [NYT]

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• Source: https://dealbreaker.com/2024/11/you-cant-expect-dan-loeb-to-overlook-both-the-reporters-severed-limbs-in-a-suitcase-and-no-wine

• Source Link: https://zephyrnet.com/you-cant-expect-dan-loeb-to-overlook-both-the-reporters-severed-limbs-in-a-suitcase-and-no-wine/