In his economic Vision 2030, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke about the Neom City project, calling it “the dreamy city”, which will be the largest and the most luxurious city in the world; the city that will gather dreamers of the world together.
During the Vision 2030 ceremony, the team in charge of NEOM management said that its project will cost 500 billion US dollars, promising that the city will generate billions of dollars for the treasury of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Nearly four years have passed since the launch of the project, yet the project is not clear and the companies investing in the city are still unknown, and there is no news of its projects as to whether it started operating or even completed.
Al-Jazeera published a report a few months ago, in which it revealed a group of recent satellite images of the NEOM City project. The images showed that the city has only 5 royal palaces built on an area of more than 2 million square meters, in addition to two other buildings, believed to be incomplete hotels for the tourists according to the report.
The city project was scheduled to be completed in three phases, the first phase ends in 2025, however, once the project started it stopped for several reasons including the high cost, which exceeds the budget of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, especially given the investors’ reluctance to participate due to the lack of clarity of the project’s features, which was described in the international report as an unrealistic project.
The important question to be raised here is: for whose benefit are these billions of the money of the Saudi people being wasted, knowing that it would not benefit any of the Saudi people?
If we assumed that it would make revenues, how much would that be? Would it cover the costs of the project? How many people would benefit from it?
Is Neom a purely Saudi economic vision, or is the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pursuing it according to an external vision he has to follow? Not to forget that the former US President Donald Trump took billions of Saudi Arabia in exchange for its protection!
Read More: NEOM’s First Visitor: MBS Recieves Netanyahu at the Opening of International Visits to the city
