Prince Mohammed, who has already been the dominion’s de facto ruler for a number of years, beforehand served as deputy prime minister beneath King Salman in addition to defence minister.
He’s being changed as defence minister by his youthful brother, Khalid bin Salman, who was deputy defence minister.
The heads of different vital ministries, together with inside, international and vitality, remained in place, in keeping with a royal decree from King Salman printed by the official Saudi Press Company.
Prince Mohammed, who turned 37 final month, has been first in line to succeed his father as king since 2017.
Saudi Arabia has for years sought to quell hypothesis over the well being of the 86-year-old king, who has dominated the world’s prime oil exporter since 2015.
In 2017, it dismissed experiences and mounting hypothesis that the king was planning to abdicate in favour of Prince Mohammed.
King Salman has been hospitalised twice this yr, most lately a one-week keep in Could that concerned exams together with a colonoscopy, in keeping with state media.
Sweeping adjustments
Prince Mohammed grew to become defence minister in 2015, a key step in a swift consolidation of energy.
In that function he has overseen Saudi Arabia’s navy actions in Yemen, the place the dominion leads a coalition backing the internationally recognised authorities in its combat in opposition to Iran-aligned Huthi rebels.
He has additionally turn into the general public face of a sweeping reform agenda generally known as Imaginative and prescient 2030.
Adjustments have included granting girls the appropriate to drive, opening cinemas, welcoming international vacationers, defanging the spiritual police and internet hosting pop stars and high-profile heavyweight fights and different sporting occasions.
But he has additionally jailed critics and, in a sweeping purge of the nation’s elite, detained and threatened some 200 princes and businessmen in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton lodge in a 2017 anti-corruption crackdown that tightened his grip on energy.
He gained international notoriety for the 2018 killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi within the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate.
Final yr, US President Joe Biden declassified an intelligence report that discovered Prince Mohammed had authorized the operation in opposition to Khashoggi, an assertion Saudi authorities deny.
However the spike in vitality costs triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurred quite a few Western leaders to journey to Saudi Arabia to enchantment for ramped-up oil manufacturing, notably then-UK prime minister Boris Johnson and Biden himself, who swallowed an earlier vow to make the Saudi management a “pariah”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz grew to become the most recent main chief to go to the dominion this previous weekend.