Saudi prince sues Forbes magazine for saying he’s only worth

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Saudi prince sues Forbes magazine for saying he’s only worth $20-billion

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/ ... es-forbes/

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has launched a libel lawsuit against Forbes magazine, claiming the U.S. publication undervalued his wealth to the tune of nearly US$10 billion in its annual ranking of the world’s richest people earlier this year, according to several news reports.

The global business mogul severed ties with the Forbes rich list in March after the magazine pegged his value at US$20 billion, which was not enough to earn him a spot in the ranking’s top 10 (he placed 26th).


Alwaleed was ranked No.26 on Forbes’s 2013 list of the world’s richest people.
Alwaleed, the richest man in the Middle East, insisted he’s actually worth US$3o billion and accused Forbes of “intentional biases and inconsistencies” in its valuation process.

Forbes shot back with an article explaining that it considered Kingdom Holding Company, the investment firm that accounts for a large chunk of the prince’s wealth, to be worth US$10.6 billion, about US$9.3 billion less than what its market capitalization would suggest.

Alwaleed’s defamation claim against Forbes, filed to London’s High Court on April 30, names Randall Lane, the magazine’s editor, and the two journalists who worked on the article, according to a Telegraph report.

In the period leading up to the list’s publication, Forbes said it began to hear from executives close to Alwaleed who said he was using Kingdom – which owns stakes in major U.S. firms like Citigroup and Apple — to “inflate” his overall net worth.

“Their accounts were based on closely watching the stock, versus direct evidence,” says the Forbes piece. “But one executive said he could not figure out any other explanation for why the shares went up dramatically at the same time the key asset, the large Citi stake, tanked.”

In a statement to the Guardian newspaper, Forbes said it was surprised that Alwaleed had decided to sue it, “particularly if he has done so in the United Kingdom, a jurisdiction that has nothing whatsoever to do with our recent story which raised questions about his claims about his wealth.”

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