Miami Mayor Francis Suarez Spoke at Another Saudi Conference

City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez spoke at a conference organized by the Saudi Arabian government last month, raising questions about his ongoing relationship with the repressive Saudi regime.

Roughly a year after the Miami Herald first reported on Suarez's close ties to Saudi Arabia — highlighting how he used his office to help the country whitewash its well-earned notoriety for human rights violations, including hosting a summit in Miami for Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund — the mayor spoke at another Saudi-run conference using the city seal.

Email records New Times obtained via a public-records request show that in mid-December of 2024, Suarez participated remotely in the International MICE Summit hosted by the Saudi Conventions & Exhibitions General Authority (SCEGA), a government agency whose mission involves developing the country's exhibitions and conferences industry. (MICE is an acronym for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions.)

Held December 15-17 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the summit featured dozens of speakers, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's minister of tourism, the CEO of the Saudi Tourism Authority, the CEO of the Future Investment Initiative Institute (FII), and several current and former city leaders from around the globe, including the mayor of Medellín, Colombia, and the former mayor of Austin, Texas.
As in the past, Suarez was the only sitting U.S. elected official on the event's list of speakers.

Much of the discussion at the summit focused on ramping up tourism in the Middle Eastern nation in line with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud's grand plan to reduce his country's reliance on oil and rebrand itself as a sports and tourism hub.

In 2023, the country won the bid to host the World Expo 2030. FIFA also recently announced it will host the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia, marking a huge victory for Prince Mohammed's long-standing Vision 2030 initiative.

"His Excellency and His Highness, the Crown Prince, and His Excellency the Minister of Tourism there in Saudi Arabia have focused on creating a MICE destination for them that meets their view and their vision of the world of the future," Suarez said during the conference. "Miami, similarly, is doing the same thing."

A month earlier, on November 15, Suarez appeared via video call to speak on a panel called "MICE Epicenters: Balancing Innovation with Timeless Appeal," heaping praise onto Vision 2030 when answering the moderator's questions regarding Miami's conference and exhibition industry.
"You have to plan today to make sure that you are succeeding in the future, which is why I think so many people around the world acknowledge the 2030 vision," Suarez said. "They acknowledge it because they realize that there's a country that has set concrete goals and has a mission and a vision set around meeting the moment in the future."

Suarez spoke on the panel alongside Sven Bossu, CEO of the International Association of Convention Centres (AIPC), and Saleh Aloraini, a director of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), the nation's sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Prince Mohammed. Aloraini is also CEO of Soudah Development, a real estate development company owned by the PIF and one of the summit's founding partners, according to its website.

The PIF is widely seen as a key component of Vision 2030; the fund has described itself as a "catalyst" for the strategic plan. It's also considered a key tool in Saudi Arabia's mission to "sportswash" and "whitewash" its tainted human rights record, as laid out in a November 2024 report published by the nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW), entitled "Saudi Arabia: Public Investment Fund Linked to Abuses."

As HRW explains, "sportswashing" works by "laundering a government’s reputation through hosting major sport events which attract widespread, positive media attention, while diverting it away from the host’s abuses."

Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia researcher in HRW's Middle East and North Africa division who authored the report, tells New Times that the PIF has funded a handful of sportswashing efforts in the United States and the United Kingdom, including LIV Golf tournaments and the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

"The PIF funds all of these efforts to make folks think about UFC or LIV Golf rather than, you know, the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi."

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"The PIF really funds all of these efforts to make folks think about UFC or LIV Golf rather than, you know, the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi or the record number of death sentences that were handed out last year," Shea says.

Suarez's speaking appearance at the MICE Summit raises questions about his ongoing relationship with Saudi Arabia in light of the nation's documented litany of human rights violations. The abuses include discrimination against women — who are required to have a male legal guardian — a rising number of executions in recent years, and a lack of free speech.

Then there was the grisly murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. U.S. intelligence has said it believes Prince Mohammed ordered the killing.

A spokesperson for Suarez's office did not respond to New Times' request for comment and questions about his views on Saudi Arabia's human-rights record.

As previously reported by New Times, Suarez popped up at the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, back in August 2024. He was seen seated in the front row, just several chairs down from Prince Mohammed.

According to the Herald, Suarez has been cozying up to Saudi's PIF for some time now. The Miami mayor previously appeared onstage at a March 2023 conference in Miami Beach alongside Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who is the governor of Saudi Arabia’s PIF and the crown prince's right-hand man. Suarez's office reportedly co-organized the 2023 event with the PIF.

Additionally, the PIF is a client of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, an international law firm where Suarez works as a private attorney. (Suarez has maintained that he keeps his city business separate from his work as a private attorney.)

HRW's Joey Shea says that, given what her organization and others have reported about the PIF and human rights abuses, individuals and businesses should think long and hard before engaging in business relationships with the sovereign wealth fund.

"It's very clear that the PIF is a really important tool to whitewash [the crown prince's] personal record on human rights abuses and the Saudi government's record on rights abuses more broadly," she says. "And if you are participating in that whitewashing, then, you know, that's pretty egregious in and of itself."