By Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh won the right to host the Expo 2030 world fair, vote results showed on Tuesday, in another diplomatic victory for a Gulf country after the Qatar soccer World Cup last year.
South Korea’s Busan and Italy’s Rome were also in the running to host the world fair, a five-yearly event that attracts millions of visitors and billions of dollars in investment.
Riyadh won 119 votes, Busan 29 and Rome 17, results from 182 members of the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) showed. Saudi Arabia needed to garner two thirds of the votes to win from the first round.
Riyadh had enlisted soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays for the Al-Nassr Saudi club, to convince members in a video projected before the vote. The Saudi capital has proposed to host the event between October 2030 and March 2031.
The win is the icing on the cake for de-facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious Vision 2030 program, which aims to wean the country off its oil dependency.
Critics say Prince Mohammed wants to use the event to improve his country’s image after the 2018 murder of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which Western leaders believe was ordered by the crown prince.
(Reporting by Elisabeth Pineau, writing by Piotr Lipinski, Editing by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Christina Fincher)
