Riyadh is pressing ahead with its events calendar

Good morning, friends. Saudi Arabia is pressing ahead with its marquee business calendar, even as Houthi attacks on the country’s biggest airports have led some execs to rethink their travel plans.

The World Petroleum Council’s Energy Congress kicked off yesterday and runs through to the end of the week, with the Future Investment Initiative following later this month, both at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in Riyadh. The UK has warned against all but essential travel to the capital and other parts of the Kingdom, consultancies are curbing trips, and Italy’s energy minister will address the congress by video, the Financial Times reports.

But even as some are staying away, plenty are still going: Senior Middle East bankers are planning smaller delegations and several foreign energy executives said they will be there on the view that “the Saudis remember who their friends were in bad times.

Kroll associate managing director Phil Miles told the FT that executives are loath to pull out of an event the size of FII, so firms are “deferring decision-making” until the last possible moment. One banker expecting a thinner foreign turnout was blunter about it, saying it would mean “less competition for face time.”

FII organizers said on Friday that the summit will go ahead with “comprehensive security measures.” Officials are treating this week’s energy congress as the bellwether, a person familiar with their thinking told the salmon-colored paper, and the final call rests on state security’s confidence that the airports, the venue and the hotels are protected against cruise missiles.

Across the pond, the Trump administration froze PERM green card processing for Microsoft, Adobe, Tata Consultancy Services and Capgemini over allegations that the system was being abused, Reuters reported. Microsoft is the largest single filer of PERM applications on Labor Department data and said 80% of its H-1B filings last fiscal year were extensions or status changes for existing staff, paid on the same terms as US peers. The administration has also opened investigations into nine universities including Harvard, Yale and Stanford over alleged misuse of J-1 exchange visas to hold down labor costs. Both squeezes hit pipelines that Gulf employers and universities are recruiting from. –Salma