Natural Selection
The head of the world’s largest and most ambitious construction project has stepped down amid jaw-dropping claims about its death toll.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Nadhmi al-Nasr, the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city project Neom — which includes The Line, a planned pair of skycrapers that would be 100 miles in length — has abruptly departed the role he’s held since 2018. This exit comes after a new Channel 3 documentary alleged that more than 21,000 foreign workers had died during its construction, a figure that doesn’t even seem to include the number of indigenous people displaced and disappeared during Neom’s construction.
Sources familiar with the executive shakeup confirmed to the newspaper that he had left the position in recent days, though it remains unclear why exactly the Neom CEO left and whether it had to do with the recent allegations.
In an email viewed by the WSJ, Neom’s board named Aiman al-Mudaifer, a real estate executive with the Saudi kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, as al-Nasr’s successor. In that email, Neom’s governing body said the move was a “strategic decision of the Board and a natural evolution.”
Behind Budget
While the specter of all those deaths hangs over the project, insiders who spoke to the WSJ said that the Public Investment Fund is now stepping in to take over after repeated delays and ballooning budgets on the project that seems very difficult to execute.
An experienced builder, al-Nasr oversaw the construction of both a giant oil field for the kingdom’s Aramco oil company and a university complex jutting up against the Red Sea.
But the mind-boggling planned scope of Neom — which beyond the 100-mile skyscrapers are also slated to include a soccer stadium for the kingdom’s 2026 World Cup bid, a ski resort in the desert, and a floating business district — is far beyond anything on the ex-CEO’s résumé.
As the newspaper’s sources note, two of Neom’s other top executives, a pair of Westerners who were the subjects of a WSJ corruption exposé earlier this year, have also left their positions in recent months. Viewed together, these departures suggest the Saudis are cleaning house — and that the people who died to get there may matter less than the kingdom’s bottom line.
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