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The World’s Biggest Construction Project Is a Magnet for Executives Behaving Badly

Saudi Arabia’s Neom project contends with corruption, worker deaths, racism and misogyny

In a recording heard by the Journal, Neom’s Wayne Borg said during a phone call that white people ‘are at the top of the pecking order.’ ALEXANDRA CITRIN-SAFADI/WSJ

By Rory Jones

Updated Sept. 11, 2024

Neom executives were summoned to the office to manage a crisis: Three workers had recently died toiling on the world’s biggest construction project.

Wayne Borg, a former Hollywood executive hired to run Neom’s media division, expressed frustration over the interruption to his evening.

“A whole bunch of people die so we’ve got to have a meeting on a Sunday night,” he said on a phone call, according to a recording heard by The Wall Street Journal. He said the project’s blue-collar workers from the Indian subcontinent had been “f—ing morons” and “that is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.”

The Australian is among thousands of expatriates hired to turn the monumental visions of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman into reality. Neom, his signature initiative, markets itself as “the land of the future, where the greatest minds and best talents are empowered to embody pioneering ideas.”

In practice, the project has become a magnet for executives with checkered pasts and inappropriate workplace behavior, according to current and former executives and documents, emails and recordings reviewed by the Journal.

Borg, 59, has been recorded making racist and misogynistic comments. Another top manager has a corruption conviction in his home country and remains under investigation there. Neom has investigated other star executives for embezzlement. Subordinates say Neom’s chief executive berates and belittles employees.

The workplace issues illustrate a broader problem for Mohammed. He has made Neom the symbol of his ambitious reform program and is investing hundreds of billions of dollars of oil money building it, with plans to host the Asian Winter Games and the FIFA World Cup there. If Neom fails, the 39-year-old de facto ruler risks squandering his country’s wealth, and his reputation as a reformer.

In a meeting about the worker fatalities last summer, Neom’s chief executive, Nadhmi al-Nasr, demanded to know what had gone wrong, according to current and former employees. A falling pipe killed one worker; a wall collapsed on another; and one person died after mishandling explosives, the current and former employees said.

Even as Neom sought to limit fatalities, Borg demonstrated a casual disregard for worker safety. “You can’t train for stupidity,” Borg said in a later conversation about the deaths. “The white blokes are at the top of the tree.”

Neom said its top priority is protecting the welfare of employees, who are encouraged to anonymously voice concerns. Neom has a code of conduct and promotes a set of values that include being respectful, embracing cultural differences and acting responsibly.

Neom in a statement said it has a culturally diverse workforce of roughly 5,000 employees from more than 100 countries and has a zero-tolerance approach to inappropriate workplace behavior. The project said it investigates every health-and-safety incident.

“Any allegations of wrongdoing and misconduct are thoroughly investigated,” Neom said. It added: “If any wrongdoing is substantiated, we take appropriate action.”

The Saudi government referred a request for comment to Neom. A representative for Borg didn’t respond to a request for comment.

EGALITARIAN ENVIRONMENT

Mohammed launched Neom to fast-track his kingdom into the modern world. He sectioned off a Massachusetts-sized parcel with plans for its own laws and a liberal, egalitarian environment to attract smart foreigners and businesses.

From Neom’s earliest conception, Mohammed was willing to back controversial executives to translate his bold ideas into reality.

These include a multitrillion-dollar pair of skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building, designed to run 105 miles long and known as the Line. Neom is meant to be a logistics hub, a tourism destination and a world leader in health, media and renewable energy.

NEOM’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE, NADHMI AL-NASR, IS KNOWN AS A DIFFICULT MANAGER.

In 2017, Mohammed appointed Klaus Kleinfeld to run Neom, months after the German lost his job as chief executive of Arconic, the aluminum maker. Kleinfeld had sent a letter that included a vague threat toward the billionaire whose hedge fund campaigned for Kleinfeld’s ouster. Kleinfeld resigned after Arconic’s board said he showed bad judgment in sending the letter.

A year later, Mohammed replaced Kleinfeld with Nasr, the current chief executive, who has a reputation for a difficult management style. At Neom, staff have complained that he rails at employees, the Journal has previously reported.

“I drive everybody like a slave,” Nasr said in one meeting, according to a recording heard by the Journal.

Recruiters and former employees say Neom’s ability to draw talent has been hurt by Nasr’s decision to move staff to the project’s remote location in the kingdom’s desert northwest. There, more than 100,000 white-collar and blue-collar construction workers live in temporary trailer parks, a hundred miles from a major city. Alcohol is banned and there are few social diversions. The murder in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi spooked some would-be workers.

White-collar employees from companies such as GE, Amazon and Cisco Systems have joined, encouraged by paychecks that average $1.1 million for Neom’s senior leaders and the chance to create an industry or company in a country that until recently was closed off to the outside world.

Current and former employees say the culture at the project follows the hard-charging style of Mohammed, the son of 88-year-old King Salman. He allows what many consider bad behavior as long as an executive delivers on his vision, according to former Neom employees.

PUBLIC-MALFEASANCE CHARGES

One of those who has impressed the prince is Antoni Vives, an executive who has helped lead development of the Line.

In 2021, some inside Neom pushed for the ouster of Vives, 59, after a Spanish court convicted him of corruption in his previous role in Barcelona’s city hall, former employees said.

He pleaded guilty to public-malfeasance charges that he gave a friend a no-show job worth around $165,000 over four years. He agreed with prosecutors to a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Vives resigned from Neom but was soon back after Mohammed told Nasr to convince him to return, some of the former employees said. As long as Vives didn’t commit the crime in Saudi Arabia, he didn’t care, the royal told executives working on Neom.

He has overcome questions about his past by building a bond with Mohammed as one of the few people who understand his desire to build a development that leaves a physical legacy, some of the former employees added.

“Vives is the Line, the Line is Vives,” Nasr has told associates, according to one of the former employees who heard the remark.

Tensions have risen between Vives and construction project managers to deliver. In one incident, the tall and broad-shouldered Vives argued with a construction manager and the two men physically wrestled. Vives then demanded his dismissal, according to a former employee and a person familiar with the altercation. The executive stayed, backed by another executive who threatened to quit should his colleague be forced out, these people said.

ANTONI VIVES IS ACCUSED OF CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY, FRAUD AND PERVERSION OF JUSTICE IN SPAIN.

In October 2022, Spanish prosecutors again accused Vives of corruption during his time in office in Barcelona. This time the case related to construction contracts awarded for the redevelopment of a well-known city square, according to an indictment.

Prosecutors are seeking a six-year prison term for Vives, who is accused of criminal conspiracy, fraud and perversion of justice. Vives and a lawyer who represented him in his first case didn’t respond to requests for comment.

BRIGHTEST MINDS

A series of videos Neom produced in 2020, dubbed “Brightest Minds,” featured two senior Neom executives—Melvin Samsom and Maliha Hashmi.

Samsom, who is Dutch, had moved to Neom after resigning as chief executive of the Swedish hospital affiliated with the institute that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Hashmi has a law degree and a master’s from Harvard.

In the video, Samsom explained how Neom was designing a healthcare system from scratch. Inside Neom’s real-estate projects, the crown prince wants to create a home for industries such as healthcare to employ Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning generation of young people and drive economic growth.

In 2021, Neom officials found that Samsom and Hashmi had awarded contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a consulting firm founded by one of Hashmi’s relatives, according to current and former Neom employees and corporate records. The firm, Boston-based Myriad Consulting, also employed Samsom’s son, these people said.

Samsom and Hashimi contracted Myriad to help develop a genetics center in 2020 without a competitive tender, even though Myriad had been founded only a year before with few employees and had only a limited online presence.

A “discussion with industry professionals and regional network has identified the vendor as the best provider for the expert skills for this unique project,” Hashmi wrote, according to a document viewed by the Journal.

When Samsom heard in the spring of 2021 that Neom executives were investigating the contract, he drove to the airport and left his keys in the car as he fled, according to some of the current and former employees. Both he and Hashmi were fired.

Hashmi, Samsom and Myriad didn’t respond to requests for comment.

‘MILLION DOLLAR ISLAND’

Borg, the media executive, was featured in the same “Brightest Minds” series, where he explained that Neom was going to redefine “how many parts of the media industry operate.”

He came to the project from Fox Corp. after nearly two decades working for movie studios in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, according to his LinkedIn profile. Fox and Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

He has worked with companies to produce movies and a reality-television series called “Million Dollar Island” filmed amid Neom’s rugged desert landscape.

Early in his tenure at Neom, Borg was hauled in front of human resources for calling a female subordinate, who is Black, a “Black shit,” according to some of the former employees.

In messages to his subordinate, Borg said “I miss you” and your “arse is better than Beyoncé’s,” alongside kiss emojis, according to a summary of the employee’s grievance, which added that Borg denied making the “Black shit” comment.

When the Western woman met with human resources, Neom’s male head of the department mistakenly asked her to explain the issue of “black tits,” before he came to understand that Borg had called his colleague a “Black shit,” according to some of the former employees and a recording of Borg discussing it.

In a later meeting, Borg laughed about the mistake, according to the recording, and referred to “that f—ing episode I had with that Black bitch.”

Neom’s human resources recommended that Borg receive six months of personal coaching, according to the summary of the employee’s grievance.

Since that issue, Borg has made statements in closed-door meetings that have demonstrated a disregard for the culture and religion of Saudi Arabia, according to audio heard by the Journal.

In one meeting, Borg referred to women from the Arabian Gulf as looking like “transvestites” and in another joked that certain sexual positions are forbidden in Islam, according to the audio.

“Do you wanna guess which ones?” he said. “Doggy-style, because it’s animalistic.”

Eliot Brown, Xavier Fontdegloria and Joshua Kirby contributed to this article.

Top illustration photos: Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film Festival, Bloomberg News

Write to Rory Jones at Rory.Jones@wsj.com