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Comment by tracer4201 | Hacker News Reader

Paywall so couldn’t read full article. If someone buys during IPO, what prevents Saudi government from just running away with investors money?

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Like with sovereign bond defaulters or countries who have nationalised US owned assets: they would get sued in US courts. US courts would freeze and/or confiscate Saudi assets. Saudi Princes might find yatchs, private planes and super cars start getting impounded wherever lawsuits can be filed.

The Saudis engaged in a widely-publicised example of state-sanctioned murder of a US journalist last year with limited repercussions. I’d think twice before trusting in the rule of law where our politically expedient friends are concerned.

Right, but in the US, there's a big difference between murdering someone and taking investors' money.

Khashoggi wasn't a "US journalist" or a US citizen. He was a Saudi citizen, and he was killed on foreign soil. As despicable as the events were, let's not lose track of the facts here.

WaPo calls him a "Saudi journalist and author": https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jamal-khashoggi/

If you're appalled by this murder, do recall that our lord and savior Barack Obama droned US citizens he didn't like without trial in Yemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

So I'd say such extrajudicial executions are about par for the course for nation states.

Hit squads with bone saws sawing people up in their embassies are not par for the course. This was an extreme event. Drone striking ones citizens is extreme too.

Sure (assuming "bone saws" aren't made up by the Turks - they've never actually been demonstrated). But be that as it may, we're hardly fit to lecture others from our high horse.

> But be that as it may, we're hardly fit to lecture others from our high horse.

Could you explain this? Why can’t a group claim moral superiority for not butchering people? And what grouping of people does ‘we’ refer to?

United States. It was suggested that the US should sever ties with SA to protest the killing.

No one suggested that. Let’s not lose track of the facts here. The original point was about whether Saudi Arabia is a rule of law jurisdiction; it is not and potential investors might do well to keep that in mind.

Ah, thanks. That’s a ‘we’ I am not part of.

It looks like the actual target of the drone was the Egyptian al-Banna. In any case, IMHO either you are able to target active terrorists without judicial overview or you're not, whatever their citizenship. I'm a Brit, so no skin in that particular issue, but for the record I have no problem with British jihadists that joined ISIS getting bombed. They made their choice.

They might find that a completely acceptable tradeoff for hundreds of billions of dollars. Believing the Saudi government cares about the rule of law is a questionable proposition at best.

This is only listing on Riyadh’s stock exchange

Good luck with jumping through all those hoops to invest and expecting recourse

what would prevent it from getting rolled up in an ETF and listed on, say, Nasdaq?

that does nothing to protect the underlying asset.

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