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The Saudi-Spanish Al Shoula consortium, which last year won the contract to build the $8.5bn high-speed Mecca to Medina railway, announced on 2 July that six banks had agreed to provide a $811m loan facility.

Qatar Airways (QA), which is 50% government owned, has long boasted of its growth and reach. In 2001, GSN wrote of chief executive Akbar Al-Baker’s ambition and competitiveness.

Qatar Airways (QA) is considering launching an airline in Saudi Arabia, but wants Riyadh to ease restrictions on domestic operators first, the airline said on 3 July.

While Kuwait and Baghdad have been edging towards compromise in the war of words over Iraq’s Mubarak Al-Kabir port mega-project, tensions are being stoked by threats from an Iraqi militant group with strong Iranian connections. Washington shares Kuwait’s concerns about Kataib Hizbollah’s potential to further inflame tensions in the region

Leave aside for a moment the football politics, so often an opaque affair, and the disappointment of much larger and more established soccer-playing nations, whose hopes of hosting a World Cup were dashed by the Zurich-based Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the sport’s governing body. What does the success of Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 Fifa World Cup say about the nature of polities and geopolitics as the world remakes itself after a decade defined by the West’s unresolved interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and staggers to an end with European economies and the United States struggling to recover from the credit crunch?

The joint venture between Qatar Telecom (QTel) and Tunisia’s Princesse El-Materi Holding, which is trying to buy Orascom Telecom Holding’s 50% stake in Telecom Tunisie (Tunisiana), reflects Qatar’s skill at making deals with North African ruling elites.

Questions are being asked about why the Aden Container Terminal (ACT) has been left behind while Adenites watch the development of nearby ports such as Djibouti and Oman’s Salalah facility.

Allegations about Maan Al-Sanea were first made in the New York Supreme Court in a counter-claim after Ahmed Hamad Al-Gosaibi and Brothers (AHAB) was sued by the UAE-based Mashreq Bank, owned by the Al-Ghurair family, which claimed it was owed

Iraq’s Ministry of Transportation is liquidating Iraqi Airways, one of the Middle East’s oldest airlines

The Jubail export refinery is scheduled to hit the financing market in June, “but will probably come a little later,” a leading regional project finance banker, who wished not to be identified, told GSN. The Jubail facility was estimated initially to cost a massive $12bn, but Saudi Aramco is seeking a reduction to below $10bn for the proposed

Saudi Arabia has an estimated $500bn “stashed away in US treasuries” (bonds), as one expert puts it. And the view being ordered from above – from King Abdullah Bin Abdelaziz down – is that “more of this will be invested at home, as was signalled by lifting the limits on the amount the PIF [Public Investment Fund, chaired by Finance Minister