The chairman of the new golf series will be the chairman of state-owned petroleum company Saudi Aramco, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who also controls English soccer team Newcastle United and is himself a governor of the PIF. Soccer, video games and other investments The PIF plans to make undisclosed additional investments into the entity. Critics of LIV Golf accused the Saudis of backing the new tour as a form of “sportswashing” its reputation.īut the legal battles, acrimony and competition for the best golfers between LIV and the PGA and DP World Tour suddenly ended Tuesday with the announcement that the three would form a combined for-profit company. It led to a year-long legal battle that banned LIV golfers from the established tours and brought some unwanted attention to Saudi’s human rights record.
The PIF’s creation of LIV Golf a year ago, reportedly at a cost of $2 billion, attracted many of the sport’s top players away from the US-based PGA Tour and Europe-based DP World Tour by offering big dollar prize money. While some of those are pension funds for a country’s citizens or public employees, others, like the PIF, operate the way a private sector investment firm might, trying to make money through a diversified portfolio of investments.īut what makes Saudi Arabia’s fund different from those private investment firms is that since the country faces widespread condemnation for its human rights record, its investments in sports and other entertainment companies can be seen as an attempt to polish that tarnished reputation. It is ranked only the seventh-largest in the world, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute. A state-owned investment fund like the PIF is not unique. It is aiming to top $1 trillion within a few years.
The Saudi Public Investment Fund is a government-controlled fund that has $650 billion in assets under management, according to its most recent filing. But that is only a small sliver of the money it is sinking into a number of prominent businesses elsewhere around the globe as the kingdom moves to diversify away from a dependence on oil income – and as the petro-kingdom tries to achieve its political goals. Saudi Arabia’s mountain of cash has upended the world of professional golf.
0 kommentar(er)
