The Aramco IPO may now be history, put on indefinite hold several weeks ago, but Saudi Arabia’s funding needs have never been greater. As a result, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MbS, has come up with a “novel” scheme to raise tens of billions for the government. According to the WSJ, the de facto Saudi leader is forcing urging Aramco, also known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, to raise debt to buy a controlling stake in a petrochemical company from the country’s sovereign-wealth fund. The money would then go to the government – whose latest fund-raising strategy, we remind readers, was to round up the country’s oligarchs and hold them in a “hotel” until they paid up – to be spent as MbS sees fit. Should the deal go through, and there are many reasons why it won’t, it would give the Public Investment Fund between […]