Enhanced cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Russia through the Opec+ prism is yielding investment dividends. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) led a high-level business delegation to Saudi Arabia this week and pledged to ramp up investments. The sovereign wealth fund’s CEO Kirill Dmitriev met with the kingdom’s energy sector leadership including Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih, Aramco President Amin Nasser, senior figures from petchems giant Sabic and the Managing Director of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) Yasir al-Rumayyan.
RDIF and PIF have an existing $10bn joint investment partnership and Mr Dmitriev says this has so far invested $2bn in Russian projects. He expects this to surge in 2019. Mr Falih says “We are looking forward to new deals already this year in such sectors as oil field services, petrochemicals and gas chemicals.” He added that Aramco is still planning to purchase a stake in the 19.8mn t/y Arctic LNG-2 project (MEES, 30 November 2018). (CONTINUED - 154 WORDS)