In 2022 Saudi Arabia’s energy minister gave a rare public display of distaste for the role of management consultants who had become virtually indispensable to his own ministry. “The institution has no cadre to keep it sustainable,” complained Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, during a talk in Riyadh in November 2022. “No future outlook safeguarded by people who take it from start to finish.”

For most of its history, the energy ministry’s operations and planning have relied on a mix of employees seconded from state oil company Saudi Aramco and embedded consulting firms.

But some officials fear Saudi ministries have become over-reliant on western consultancies, from the Big Four of Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC to more specialist strategy consulting firms, as disgruntlement grows about the outsiders’ ever-growing role in running the country.