Expatriate Executives Flee Saudi Arabia’s Bad Bosses
https://www.wsj.com/articles/expatriate-executives-flee-saud…
In the summer of 2020, two videogame companies canceled sponsorship deals with Saudi Arabia’s planned city-state of Neom following fan complaints about the country’s human-rights record. Neom Chief Executive Nadhmi al-Nasr called an emergency meeting on a weekend and asked his communications team why it hadn’t warned him this might happen.
“If you don’t tell me who is responsible,” Mr. Nasr said, according to people with direct knowledge of the meeting, “I’m going to take a gun from under my desk and shoot you.”
The man handpicked by Prince Mohammed to lead Neom often berates and scares his employees, current and former Neom staff members say. Under Mr. Nasr’s leadership, Neom has lost dozens of expat executives from its 1,500-member workforce. Many have resigned or been fired since being poached from companies such as Walt Disney Co., Siemens AG and Marriott International. Some have forfeited contracts of more than $500,000 a year rather than work under Mr. Nasr, former employees said.
When I was at Exxon in the 1980’s and they wanted to get rid of older employees, they’d tell them that they had run out of work for them in Houston, but there’s job in Saudi we can give you. If that doesn’t work for you, maybe you should think about retiring?
Some questioned whether the Saudi job every really existed, because it was guaranteed that no one would take it.
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