A number of world's leaders and officials, including from the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Pakistan, are taking part in the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference, that began earlier on Tuesday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, despite political tensions surrounding the murder of Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly killed in a brawl in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in early October
RIYADH (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 23rd October, 2018) A number of world's leaders and officials, including from the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Pakistan, are taking part in the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference, that began earlier on Tuesday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, despite political tensions surrounding the murder of Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly killed in a brawl in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in early October.
The situation around the journalist's vanishing, which later turned out to be a murder, prompted harsh criticism of the international community, with a number of prominent businessmen and officials having decided to abandon their plans to participate in the FII in protest against the kingdom's poor human rights record.
"I would like to extend my welcome to the heads of state and leaders from Bahrain, UAE, Jordan and Lebanon, Pakistan, Gabon and Senegal, and senior officials and representatives from Russia, Kuwait," Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) Managing Director Yasir Al Rumayan said at the opening of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Riyadh.
He also announced that the FII conference would soon be transformed into an investment foundation.
"The FII is too important to be once a year and we thought of transforming the FII to a foundation, it's not going to be only an annual meeting, we will spin it off into a new institution with its independent board and CEO," the PIF chief revealed.
The conference is being held in the wake of revelations surrounding Khashoggi's murder in the building of the Saudi consulate in Turkey's Istanbul, which was persistently denied by the Saudi authorities until recently. According to Riyadh, 18 people have been arrested over their involvement in the incident.
US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde, Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra, UK Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox, and French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire were among those, who decided to boycott the event in light of the Khashoggi affair. The event's organizers then decided to hide the participants' list to avoid speculations and reduce tensions surrounding the conference's holding.
