The Saudi
Arabian finance minister has admitted billions of dollars are owed to
private construction firms and foreign workers following the fall in
oil revenue. Workers have been struggling for months without pay.
The kingdom
has already paid off 70,000 redundant laborers, but tens of thousands
remain stranded and unpaid. It has also suspended new contracts. The
Council on Economic Affairs and Development (CEDA) does not expect
all the workers to be paid off until the end of the year.“I
don’t recall the exact amount now, but its billions of dollars,”
said the new Finance Minister Mohammed Aljadaan, according to the
Guardian.
“The
ministry is now every day seeking to make thousands of payment
orders,” he added. According to the official Saudi news agency,
“the sharp decline in oil revenues and the measures taken by the
kingdom to reduce spending on a number of projects” is what led
to the delays in payment.
Saudi Arabia
gets three-quarters of its revenue from oil. The 2014 slump in energy
prices created a $98 billion budget deficit in 2015.
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After the
official visit of the US President Barack Obama to Riyadh, there
were rumors that the two countries were planning to "drown"
global market in oil, in order to reduce prices up to 12 dollars
per barrel and hit Russia economically. The plan was mentioned
even by George Soros, during a speech in Berlin, while Philip
Verleger, former consultant under Ford and Carter administrations,
estimated that in case that the United States alone would add in
the market 500,000 barrels from their strategic deposits, the
economic cost for Moscow would reach 40 billion dollars, or, 2% of
the Russian economy. The economy of Iran would had receive a
proportional hit.
The
target of such an operation, at least according to the related
scenario, would be to strike the two key pylons supporting the
Syrian regime, that is Moscow and Tehran, and open the road for
Assad's overthrow. Despite the fact that Iran, under the
leadership of Rouhani who is friendly to the West, didn't support
Syria as someone should expect, and Russia didn't rise tension for
the same matter, the two countries remained the basic barriers for
Saudi Arabia.
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