by Giuseppe Gagliano –
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), headed by Yasir Al Rumayyan, will open a branch in Paris. This important announcement was made on June 19 during the Franco-Saudi Investment Forum, a forum which not surprisingly took place in parallel with the visit of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MbS) to Paris. The Saudi Investment Fund is already present in London, New York and Hong Kong and has assets of $582 billion.
Paris is therefore the second European city where the Saudis will set up a branch of the PIF, and the presence of a Saudi branch in Paris will make it possible to manage Saudi investments in France more efficiently.
Alongside Saudi Arabia there are also the UAE, and in particular the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund managed by Khaldoon al-Mubarak, which in 2022 intended to open a branch in Paris (it has offices in Moscow, Beijing and New York), but which for tax reasons he had to abandon this project. At least for now.
The UAE fund is certainly more relevant than the Saudi one because up to now it has managed to monopolize the investments of Gulf sovereign wealth funds in France, and this has been possible because there has been a bond of friendship between UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed al -Nahyan (MbZ) and Emmanuel Macron, as well as between al-Mubarak, MbZ’s financial right-hand man and close friend and mentor to his son, with French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire.
The person in charge of investments in France is Andres Rodenas de la Vega, who collaborates with the Frenchman Antoine Bettant, who previously worked for Deutsche Bank and for the investment fund Silva International Investments. Until now, the UAE fund has played an important role in France’s industrialization and technology plans: in fact, the fund owns, for example, 88.3% of the semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, which has collaborated with the French company ST Microelectronics in July 2022 to build a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Isère in southeastern France.
The massive investment of money by both the UAE and Saudi Arabia in France certainly contributes to enriching certain sectors of France, but at the same time creates a strong dependence of France on the two Arab countries. A consideration therefore arises spontaneously: we often speak of limited sovereignty of Europe with respect to NATO and the United States, but we should also begin to reflect on the very strong economic and political conditioning that the investments of countries such as Qatar, the UAE and Arabia Saudi exercise against both the United States and Europe.
