Flush with cash from an energy boom, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies have a moment on the world’s financial stage
5 min
Five years ago, Saudi officials watched a wave of American finance executives pull out of a free investment confab in Riyadh after the murder of a dissident journalist made the kingdom a toxic place to do business.
This year, the conference, nicknamed “Davos in the Desert,” is expecting so much demand it is charging executives $15,000 a person.
Middle East monarchies eager for global influence are having a moment on the world’s financial stage. They are flush with cash from an energy boom at the very time traditional Western financiers—hampered by rising interest rates—have retreated from deal making and private investing.
The region’s sovereign-wealth funds have become the en vogue ATM for private equity, venture capital and real-estate funds struggling to raise money elsewhere.
The market for marquee mergers and acquisitions has seen a surge of interest from the region. Recently announced deals include an Abu Dhabi fund’s purchase of investment manager Fortress for more than $2 billion and a Saudi fund’s $700 million purchase of global lender Standard Chartered’s aviation unit.
Companies and funds overseen by Abu Dhabi’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, have made runs at buying Standard Chartered and investment bank Lazard. They have also struck recent deals to buy a $1.2 billion U.K. healthcare company and to take partial control of a nearly $6 billion Colombian food giant.
“Now, everybody wants to go to the Middle East—it’s like the gold rush in the U.S. once upon a time,” said Peter Jädersten, founder of fundraising advisory firm Jade Advisors. “It’s difficult to raise money everywhere.”
Fund managers visiting the region say they often wait across from rivals in waiting rooms of sovereign-wealth funds. Silicon Valley and New York managers are a near-constant presence in the white-marble floored lobby of the Four Seasons Abu Dhabi, as with other top hotels, they say.
The Riyadh conference next month—a pet project of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman known as the Future Investment Initiative—is expected to be a magnet for money hunters. In 2018, Wall Street executives backed out after Saudi operatives murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and for years many startups and funds said they avoided investment from the country over moral concerns.
Some companies continue to steer clear of the kingdom, while human-rights groups say its record on treatment of government dissidents remains a serious problem.
But Saudi funding became more in demand last year when other money began to get tight. At last year’s conference the Public Investment Fund’s chief, Yasir Al Rumayyan, sat on a panel discussion with two of the world’s biggest investment-firm executives, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates. Top names in venture capital mixed on the floor, and FTX chief Sam Bankman Fried looked for funding.
Ben Horowitz, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said at a PIF-sponsored conference this spring that Saudi Arabia was a “startup country,” and referred to Prince Mohammed as its “founder” who was creating a new culture and new vision for the country.
The region’s new dominance is most apparent among private funds, the type that lock up investors’ money for years. While detailed statistics are scarce, figures at two of the biggest sovereign funds suggest a surge. At Saudi’s PIF, commitments for “investment securities”—a category that includes private funds—rose to $56 billion in 2022, up from $33 billion a year earlier. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala reported that equity commitments doubled to $18 billion in 2022.
Executives at private-equity giants TPG, KKR and Carlyle Group have told investors that interest from the Middle East remains strong while other parts of the world recede.
“If you’re in the U.S., there’s a certain degree of concern,” Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz said at a June conference. Middle East investors, he said, are “very front-footed, very dynamic.”
While the Middle East steps on the gas, the traditional backers of investment funds—pension plans and college endowments—are in retreat. The global shift to higher interest rates caused losses in the biggest parts of their portfolios—especially stocks and bonds.
Investors put $33 billion toward U.S.-based venture capital funds in the first half of 2023, less than half the $74 billion in the same period in 2021, according to PitchBook. Global fundraising for all private funds fell 10% last year to $1.5 trillion, according to Preqin—a decline many expect to continue.
“Fundraising has become much, much harder over the past 12 months,” said Brenda Rainey, an executive vice president at Bain & Co. who advises private-equity funds.
The reason for the region’s burst of funding and deal making is twofold.
Higher energy prices—a byproduct of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—have given the region’s oil- and gas-dependent wealth funds tens of billions of dollars of extra money to spend. That means a drop in oil prices could quickly cause a pullback from the Gulf countries, as has happened in energy booms-turned-bust of the past.
At the same time, Saudi Prince Mohammed and top officials in the U.A.E. have jostled for greater sway on the world stage—in geopolitics, finance and sports—pumping additional money into their wealth funds to do deals and expand industry at home.
The intersection of politics and finance in the region has led Gulf wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar to be the main financial backers of two key Trump administration figures: Jared Kushner and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who together raised billions of dollars from the region.
Gulf funds have pushed their U.S. peers to open offices in the region to more easily win investments, fund managers say.
BlackRock has said it would create a team on the ground in Riyadh dedicated to boosting investment into infrastructure projects in the Gulf.
Millennium Management LLC, based in New York, set up an office in Dubai in 2020 and others followed, including private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners and ExodusPoint Capital Management, the largest-ever hedge-fund startup with $8 billion in initial capital. Europe’s Tikehau Capital and Ardian both established teams in Abu Dhabi, and U.S. alternative investment manager, Pretium, hired a local industry veteran from Dubai.
Dalio also set up an office in Abu Dhabi for the Dalio Family Office, his personal venture. Rajeev Misra, a longtime financier for SoftBank Groupwho secured over $6 billion in commitments for a new venture from multiple Abu Dhabi-aligned investment funds, is moving to the U.A.E. from the U.K., according to people familiar with his plans.
There is now an “awareness that relationships have to be built and that doesn’t happen overnight,” said Joseph Morris, a Dubai-based managing director at U.S.-based advisory firm Newmark Group.
The venture capital arm of Tiger Global has struggled to raise its latest fund, repeatedly cutting its target by billions of dollars. Stung by losses and the cooler fundraising environment, many U.S. investors have given it the cold shoulder, investors say.
One place it found success: Saudi Arabia. A division of PIF, Sanabil, this spring added Tiger’s name to the public list of fund managers it backs. Others on the list include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz.
Ibrahim Ajami, who oversees startup investments at Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala, which invests in companies as well as funds, said the environment gives Mubadala the ability to be “very thoughtful and selective” about who it backs.
He can negotiate terms that let Mubadala buy a stake in the fund manager itself, he said, or allow it to invest alongside others.
“What we are doing is going deeper—and more concentrated and more engaged—with a select group of managers,” he said.
—Summer Said and Berber Jin contributed to this article.
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Strong family financial planning can help reduce taxes and support younger generations. From intrafamily loans and asset gifts to inheritance disclaimers, strategic cooperation can create meaningful financial benefits—when families have the trust and structure to make it work.
4 min
Happy is the family whose members—parents, grandparents and grown children—trust each other enough to cooperate on shared goals, especially financial ones. When that is truly the case, Uncle Sam’s tax rules can help as well.
This matters especially now that mortgage rates are above 7%, and many families are looking for ways to help younger members. If the elders have resources and are confident younger ones can cooperate, a family loan could make homeownership possible while providing the elders with a useful income stream.
Other strategies can actually lower taxes, such as when funding 529 plans or Roth IRAs, or when someone inherits a traditional IRA with required withdrawals larger than they will need.
Here are three strategies useful for functional families.
It is perfectly legal for families to lend money to a relative for a down payment or even a private mortgage.
But it is important not to cut corners, says Ryan McKeown, a CPA with Modern Wealth Enhancement in Minnesota. If the loan is for a down payment, be honest with the mortgage provider and have a formal agreement. The lender owes tax on the interest payments received.
If the loan is for a private mortgage, both sides should have legal representation with a formal written agreement, including payment terms. The lender owes tax on the interest, and the borrower often can deduct it if he or she itemizes.
To avoid IRS trouble, the interest rate shouldn’t be lower than the agency’s Applicable Federal Rate at the time of the loan. Currently that is about 5% for loans longer than nine years; about 4.5% for loans three to nine years; and about 4% for loans three years or less. Currently, traditional mortgage rates are generally above 7%.
In addition, the lender could use the $19,000 annual gift-tax exemption (described below) to forgive some or all of the interest or principal annually. If both lenders and borrowers are married, that is up to $76,000 a year. There is no tax for the borrower on such forgiveness, because it is from a gift.
If you’re going this route, McKeown advises against having a fixed plan to forgive the debt. Instead, do it in one-off letters specifying the amount—and keep careful records. Otherwise the IRS might try to treat the loan as a taxable gift.
Powerful tax-saving moves for families often use gift-tax provisions. Under current law, anyone can give anyone else up to $19,000 of assets annually, free of gift tax. That means a married couple with three grandchildren could give them a total of $114,000 in 2026.
The gifts can be cash or other assets, like stock. For noncash gifts, the cost basis—which is the starting point for measuring taxable gain after a sale—“carries over” to the recipient. So if someone buys $1,000 of stock and gives it away when it is worth $5,000, the recipient’s cost basis is $1,000. If the recipient later sells the shares for $8,000, the taxable gain is $7,000.
Here’s an example showing how gifts could save a family taxes. Grandma is a widow of modest means, while her child and spouse have prospered. The couple has two children, and they want to contribute $5,000 to a 529 college-savings plan for each—but they need to sell stock to do it. Their tax rate on the sale would be 18.8%, and they would need to sell about $11,000 of stock.
However, Grandma’s federal tax rate on the stock sale is 0%. If the couple gives $10,000 of shares to Grandma, she could sell them, pay no tax, and fund the grandchildren’s 529 plans. This saves about $1,000 of tax.
These moves are legal, and they could be used in other ways, such as to help a young person fund a Roth IRA.
But trust among family members is essential: Under the law, givers can’t put conditions on a gift. Grandma could use her stock proceeds to take a cruise, but she makes 529 contributions instead.
Mark Sellner, a retired tax attorney and CPA living in Sarasota, Fla., uses this strategy. His children sell stock he gives them and fund 529 plans for his grandchildren.
The family’s tax savings aren’t huge, but he likes other benefits. The sales by his children don’t boost his adjusted gross income, which in turn could raise his Medicare Irmaa premiums or his 3.8% surtax on net investment income.
Sellner doesn’t worry about his children using the funds for another purpose.
“There can’t be any strings attached to gifts. Of course, it is up to us to decide whether to make them in the future,” he says.
Two caveats: The “kiddie tax” applies to most children under age 24, and it is levied at the parents’ rate on investment income above $2,700 in 2026. Consider this before making gifts to a young person.
Investors who give away stock also forgo the step-up, an important provision that exempts assets held at death from capital-gains tax.
Sellner knows he’s losing a step-up, but says, “The children could use a little more now. Why should they wait 20 years to get it?”
A disclaimer is a highly useful strategy in which one heir renounces an inheritance in favor of another heir. Assuming family members cooperate, this can save taxes.
Here’s one example. Dad died and had a large traditional IRA that he left to Mom. She has enough assets and income to cover her expenses, and she lives in a state with a stiff estate tax. The inherited IRA would put her estate over the threshold.
Also surviving are three young-adult children. If Mom disclaims all or part of Dad’s IRA within nine months of his death, that amount could go directly to the children. They will have 10 years to empty the account, and the family as a whole will likely save estate and income taxes.
Disclaimers have many key details, especially regarding beneficiary documents. Although heirs have great freedom in choosing what assets to disclaim, the rules about who gets disclaimed property are rigid. It is best if the original owner names tiers of heirs so that if one disclaims, the next recipient is clear.
