Savoy hotel's Saudi owner furious at Forbes who put him outside top 10 on its Rich List

- Prince clashes with Forbes magazine after they value his wealth at £13bn
Row: Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says he is worth much more than £13bn attributed to him by Forbes magazine

The Saudi owner of the Savoy Hotel is embroiled in a furious row with the compilers of a rich list who said he was worth almost $10 billion less than his own valuation.

Magazine publishers Forbes ranked Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as the world’s 26th richest person with a net worth of $20 billion (£13 billion) in its annual audit of the biggest billionaires.

But the estimate has infuriated the 57-year-old prince, a nephew of the Saudi king, who has written a strongly worded letter to the magazine’s chairman and editor-in-chief Steve Forbes.

He has now asked for his name to be removed from the list and said his office would no longer cooperate with the “biased” Forbes team responsible for the rankings.

The prince, who owns a customised A380 Airbus and a Boeing 747, did not publicly put a figure on his wealth. But a spokesman for Forbes said he had put it at $29.6 billion, placing him just inside the top 10.

Prince Alwaleed, who owns stakes in Citibank, News Corporation, Time Warner and Twitter, has said that his investment group, Kingdom Holding Company, will continue to work with Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. This rates his wealth at $28 billion — putting him in 16th place.

Kingdom chief financial officer Shadi Sanbar said in a press release: “We have worked very openly with the Forbes team over the years and have on multiple occasions pointed out problems with their methodology that need correction. However, after several years of our efforts to correct mistakes falling on deaf ears we have decided that Forbes has no intention of improving the accuracy of our holdings and we have made the decision to move on.”

Kingdom, which is based in Riyadh and is 95 per cent owned by the prince, also owns New York department store Saks Fifth Avenue. The prince wore his trademark tinted glasses when Prince Charles attended the reopening of the Savoy in 2010 after a £220 million refit.

The Kingdom press release said the Forbes valuation method was biased against investors from the Middle East as it did not accept share valuations on Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock market as accurate. It added that Forbes did this because of a “completely unsupported and biased allegation based on rumors (sic) that stock manipulation ‘is the national sport’ in Saudi Arabia because ‘there are no casinos’.”

But Forbes rejected the claims and said it had been investigating the prince’s finances for “several years” and would publish its findings in detail online to back up its estimate.

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