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Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold. When Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) rounded up more than a hundred of Saudi Arabia‘s richest businessmen, investors and members of the royal family and imprisoned them in the comparative luxury of Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton, cheering the crown prince on from the sidelines was one Donald Trump. “Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!”, he tweeted.

He didn’t say exactly who he meant, but he must surely have had primarily in mind Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi royal who likes to think of himself as the Warren Buffett of Arabia, with a string of apparently successful western investments to his name, including substantial stakes in Citigroup and, until very recently, Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.

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When Trump essentially went bust in the recession of the early Nineties, Alwaleed helped bail him out by buying his yacht and, just when a crucial debt payment was due to be made, taking a stake in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Strangely, Alwaleed later seemed to take the view that he’d had his pocket felt, and started slagging the then presidential hopeful off on Twitter and on the New York social circuit. Trump’s eventual victory might have seemed unlikely at the time, but it rarely pays to make an enemy of someone who might actually one day become the world’s most powerful man.