The Chairman of British football club, Newcastle, and governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Yasir Al-Rumayyan, is facing a $74 million lawsuit over allegations of targeting former Saudi intelligence chief, Dr Saad Al-Jabri on the orders of the Kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.
According to a report by the news outlet The Athletic, Al-Rumayyan received legal papers this month accusing him of acting with the aim of “harming, silencing and ultimately destroying” the family of Al-Jabri, who formerly served as the top aide to Saudi Arabia’s former Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Nayef.
After having fled Saudi Arabia in 2017, the same year Bin Salman deposed Bin Nayef in a ‘palace coup’, Al-Jabri has been living in Canada but has been targeted numerous times by Saudi hit teams that were reportedly operating on the direct orders of the Saudi Crown Prince.
The lawsuit is reportedly requesting the court in Canada to permit Al-Rumayyan and others – such as the PIF itself and one its board members, Minister of State, Mohammed Al Al-Sheik – to be added to an existing court case and for a new claim to be brought against them.
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If the Canadian court grants that permission, then Al-Jabri’s claim will allege that the defendants were “directly involved” in a three-and-a-half-year campaign between June 2017 and January 2021 against Al-Jabri and his family, including the orchestration of steps such as “wrongful kidnapping and detention”, “misappropriation of property” and the “expropriation” of companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the PIF.
That campaign, according to the proposed lawsuit, were taken for “political reasons” and at the service and command of Crown Prince Bin Salman. As a result of that suit, the Al-Jabri family would reportedly claim $100 million Canadian dollars ($74 million US dollars) in damages.
Since March 2020, Saudi authorities have detained children of the former intelligence chief – 23-year-old Omar Al-Jabri and 21-year-old Sarah Al-Jabri – and have reportedly subjected them to arbitrary travel bans, secret appeal hearings and a lack of communication with the outside world. All of that has been in an effort to coerce Saad Al-Jabri to return to the Kingdom.