When prominent western business leaders started withdrawing from Saudi Arabia’s flagship business conference, the Future Investment Initiative (FII), in October following the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Paddy Padmanathan was not worried.
Padmanathan, chief executive of Acwa Power, a big Saudi power producer, had numerous business meetings set up on the sidelines of ‘Davos in the desert’, as the FII is widely known, including some with the chief executives of large western banks. Their boycott of the event risked derailing those meetings, but Padmanathan was confident.
“The world is a very, very big place,” he tells Euromoney a few days after the event.
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