Nineteen months after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) originally announced Vision 2030—the privatization of state assets to power an economic restructuring—the deals are slow to actualize. “It’s going to take longer (than many expected),” a Saudi banker working on the transactions told Reuters. “There are headwinds from the shifting of priorities in government and at a micro-level as these are old institutions that have often never kept books and are not up to the rigors of privatization.” Other issues include a frustrating bureaucracy, a lack of legal framework that mollifies investors, and an unorganized implementation of Vision 2030 altogether. Uncertainty regarding the future of members of the royal family makes it even more difficult to conduct business with the authoritarians that run the kingdom. Early last month, MBS rounded up dozens of royals, ministers and tenured officials in an anti-corruption campaign seen by outsiders as a […]