RIYADH, Nov 30: Will the Arab or Saudi money finally start pulling out of the United States? If the maverick investor, Prince Waleed bin Talal, who is the largest Saudi investor in the United States, is to be believed, it may come true now.

Interestingly, in August when the news first broke that Saudis were pulling out money from the US and some 200 billion dollars had moved out of the US markets, Al Waleed had expressed scepticism about the news item.

Now, in view of the recent developments in US-Saudi ties, he feels the worst may finally happen.

Saudis are believed to have investments to the tune of 700 billion dollars in the US. Recently there have been moves on part of the US administration to freeze the assets of some wealthy Saudis on suspicion of their funding the Al Qaeda network.

Some of the relatives of the Sept 11 victims have also filed a petition claiming 1.3 trillion dollars in compensation from the Saudi government. Several members of the royal family have also been named in the petition.

The episode of Princess Hafsa’s charity funding somehow reaching the Sept 11 hijackers has also left caused bitterness. The US media have recently been portraying the Saudi government as not cooperating fully with the Bush administration in tracking down “terror funding”.

All this may lead to panic selling by Saudis, Al-Waleed now feels. However, he was of the opinion that the movement of funds form the US to other markets may not be as big as 200 billion dollars, as some reports had earlier suggested.

In his opinion, this could be considerably less than that.

Al-Waleed felt that while some of the money may come back to the region, a part of it could also flow to other parts of the world, including Europe, Asia and Latin America.

In an apparent sign of the return flow of the privately invested money in the US, some financial analysts refer to the increase in investments in real estate in Jeddah, Makkah, Dammam and Riyadh.

Waleed has billions of dollars invested in the Citigroup, AOL Time Warner, NewsCorp and other major US companies.

In an interview with The Times, he says he does not intend to pull out his own investments from the United States. “I believe that engagement is the only right thing to do, not selling out,” Al-Waleed told the Times.