The Ritz-Carlton purge, a $1.3bn demand and nine years trapped in Saudi Arabia

The FT reconstructs one family’s experience of Mohammed bin Salman’s famous 2017 “anti-corruption” purge. Rami Naimi, son of former Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi, was seized in Dubai and transferred to Saudi Arabia. His family says he was tortured and pressured at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton into signing a settlement demanding $1.3bn — despite Rami himself not possessing anything close to that fortune.

The family believes authorities were really pursuing wealth they thought his father had accumulated. What followed was not simply the few months associated with the original Ritz purge: the FT describes years of travel restrictions, electronic monitoring, renewed detention and prosecutions, with his wife Mira Lozi eventually going public after quiet diplomatic efforts went nowhere. The Saudi authorities dispute allegations surrounding mistreatment and have framed the broader purge as legitimate anti-corruption enforcement.

It gives unusually concrete evidence for how the 2017 purge could function not only as an anti-corruption drive but as a coercive mechanism for extracting settlements and neutralising powerful families.