AFP, Riyadh :
Saudi Arabia may be facing its biggest economic challenge in years but there’s little talk of falling oil revenues or austerity at Riyadh’s glittering annual Jewellery Salon.
Women in traditional black abaya robes stroll through the showrooms at a luxury Riyadh hotel, as muscle-bound security men patrol.
Hanging unobtrusively in a small glass display case is a chunky 30-carat emerald cut set of diamond earrings offered by London’s Moussaieff, one of more than 20 vendors at this year’s show, which began on Monday.
The price: $3.5 million.
“The rich are always rich,” says Leslie Kegg, a Moussaieff salesman. “If you have so much money you’re never affected. When someone else loses money, someone else makes money.”
The biggest economy in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has for decades enjoyed a windfall from its massive oil industry.
But the global collapse in crude prices over the last two years-from more than $100 a barrel in early 2014 to around $40 this month-has put pressure on Riyadh to cut spending and to intensify its efforts to find economic alternatives.
Riyadh posted a record budget deficit in 2015. With another $87 billion shortfall projected for this year, the government took the unprecedented step of raising retail fuel prices by up to 80 percent in December and cutting subsidies for electricity, water and other services.
It has also delayed some major projects and mooted privatisations and the imposition of taxes.
On Monday the kingdom is to announce its “vision” for future social and economic development, including a “National Transformation Programme” aimed at diversifying the economy away from oil, which still accounts for more than 70 percent of state revenues.
None of that was of much concern to Nouf Albaiz as she and two other young women browsed the layered necklaces, chunky rings and diamond-encrusted watches on display.
