…In a few short years, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has been transformed from an obscure and conservatively managed sovereign wealth fund to one of the world’s largest and most aggressive funds in the world. Valued at more than US $925 billion, the fund’s meteoric rise is driven by Mohammed bin Salman, who is the crown prince, prime minister, PIF chairman, and the de facto autocratic ruler of Saudi Arabia. Through the PIF, Crown Prince Mohammed has consolidated unprecedented state economic power under his sole decision-making with few, if any, constraints on how he deploys his nation’s wealth meant to benefit the entire Saudi people…

he PIF is an outlier even compared to the deleterious role sovereign wealth funds have had in some other countries, as the Fund has benefited directly from serious human rights abuses linked to its chairman, Crown Prince Mohammed. This includes the crown prince’s 2017 “anti-corruption” crackdown that consisted of arbitrary detentions, abusive treatment of detainees, and the extortion of property from Saudi Arabia’s elite…

Rights violations have also been linked to some of the PIF’s most high-profile megaprojects. The sheer scale of these ventures, their labor intensity, and their importance to the crown prince…