He Owns Much of Ethiopia. The Saudis Won’t Say Where They’re Hiding Him. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/business/saudi-arabia-purge.html
But the gilded life of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi took a sharp turn in November. Sheikh Amoudi, the gregarious 71-year-old son of a Yemeni businessman and his Ethiopian wife, was swept up with hundreds of billionaires, princes and other well-connected figures in what the Saudi government says is an anti-corruption campaign that has seized more than $100 billion in assets.
Many other detainees, who were initially kept at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, have been released, including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the well-known international investor. Sheikh Amoudi’s cousin Mohammed Aboud Al Amoudi, a property developer, was also let go.
But Sheikh Amoudi, once called the world’s richest black person by Forbes, has not been freed, leaving a vast empire that employs more than 70,000 people in limbo. He controls businesses from Ethiopia, where he is the largest private employer and the most prominent backer of the authoritarian government, to Sweden, where he owns a large fuel company, to London, which he has used as a base to set up a number of companies.