January 22, 2009, - 7:44 pm
So Sad, Too Bad: Saudi Prince AlWaleed Lost $7.9 Bill
By Debbie Schlussel
I wish that when Prince AlWaleed lost his $7.9 billion, American taxpayers didn’t bail him out by rescuing Citigroup. If the government hadn’t bailed out Citi, AlWaleed would really have gone to the cleaners. After all, he’s still worth many billions of dollars. And what’s the loss of a few billions to a multi-billionaire? He’s still worth between $10 and $20 billion.
Still, at least he got soaked a little. He is, after all, a major donor to homicide bomber telethons and a big hater of Jews, Israel, and America (he hates us, but he buys us).
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, seen just a few months ago as a bastion of Mideast support for banking giant Citigroup Inc., said Tuesday his Saudi Arabian conglomerate, Kingdom Holding Co., lost 29.7 billion Saudi riyals, or about $7.92 billion, in 2008.

The loss — about half of which Kingdom Holding blamed on impairments to its investment portfolio — coincided with the release of a survey in Dubai showing business confidence across the oil-rich Persian Gulf plummeted last quarter.
Just a few months ago, the region seemed relatively isolated from fallout from the global financial crisis convulsing much of the rest of the world. But amid tumbling oil prices, economists are revising downward oil-revenue forecasts and economic-growth estimates here.
Analysts still expect previous years of budget surpluses in places like Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters to cushion the blow of falling oil proceeds. But many governments have also socked away cash in government-controlled investment funds. Those funds, like Mr. Alwaleed’s privately owned investment company Kingdom Holding, have in recent years bet heavily on Western companies, including financial firms that have been beaten up particularly badly in recent months.
The Gulf’s biggest investment vehicles, including regional central banks who typically invest a government’s cash reserves in more liquid assets such as U.S. Treasurys, lost some $350 billion last year, according to an estimate published last week in a working paper by the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. That equates to about 27% of the funds’ value at the end of 2007. It’s impossible to say for sure how the funds have really performed as most of them don’t disclose much data.
Kingdom Holding, a conglomerate with interests in banking, hotels and private equity, said Tuesday in an English-language release to journalists that it had reported an annual operating loss last year of 14.7 billion riyals, or $3.92 billion. It also said it provided for “impairment losses” of an additional 15 billion Saudi riyals, or about $4 billion, citing “investment portfolio provisions.”
Mr. Alwaleed founded Kingdom Holding in 1980. Its international portfolio includes Fortune 500 companies Citigroup, Apple Inc., News Corp. (owner of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal) [DS: AND FOX NEWS], Time Warner Inc., and eBay Inc., according to the company’s Web site. . . .
Mr. Alwaleed’s company is also one of the biggest investors in firms listed on the Saudi stock exchange, which lost 47% of its value last year. The Saudi bourse reported in October that Mr. Alwaleed owned 94% of Kingdom’s 6.3 billion shares. Kingdom stock, traded on the exchange in Riyadh, fell 62% last year.
So sad, too bad. If only it were worse.
Modern Art That Warms My Heart . . .

AAAAWWWW poor baby
mindy1 on January 22, 2009 at 8:21 pm