Worker-Deaths on SAUDI VISION 2030 Intelligence Platform

21,000 Dead: The Worker Death Toll Behind Saudi Vision 2030

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 27 October 2024, ITV aired a documentary titled “Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia.” It contained a single statistic that the Saudi government has not refuted with a specific alternative number: approximately 21,000 foreign workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 working on Vision 2030 projects. The breakdown by nationality: more than 14,000 Indian workers, more than 5,000 Bangladeshi workers, and more than 2,000 Nepali workers. A further 100,000 workers were reported missing — a category that includes those who fled their employers, those whose documentation was confiscated and who disappeared into the informal economy, and those whose deaths were never recorded by any authority.

Abdul Wali Skandar Khan: The First Documented Death on a NEOM Construction Site

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abdul Wali Skandar Khan was 25 years old. He was a civil engineer. He was Pakistani. He had two children. On 28 December 2023, he reported to work at a healthcare centre under construction within the NEOM zone in Tabuk province, Saudi Arabia. During the installation of a metal gate, the structure fell on him. He died at the site.

His death was not reported by NEOM. It was not reported by his employer. It was not reported by Saudi authorities. It was not investigated by any party with the legal obligation or institutional capacity to determine what happened, why, and who was responsible. It was documented, eleven months later, by ALQST — the London-based Saudi human rights organisation — which identified it as the first formally documented death of a migrant worker on a NEOM construction site.

The Wayne Borg Tapes: Racism, Dead Workers, and the Executive Culture Inside NEOM

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Wayne Borg NEOM Racist Audio

In September 2024, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into the executive culture at NEOM that contained recordings, testimony, and internal documents describing an organisation in which racism, contempt for worker safety, and managerial brutality were not aberrations from the project’s character but expressions of it. The investigation centred on Wayne Borg, an Australian national who had served as NEOM’s Managing Director for Media, Entertainment, Culture and Fashion Industries since September 2019. Before NEOM, Borg had been CEO of Fox Studios Australia, President and General Manager of Fox Studios in Los Angeles, Executive Vice President for International at Universal Pictures, and Deputy CEO of Abu Dhabi’s twofour54 media zone authority. Earlier in his career, he held positions at Warner Bros, Walt Disney Co., PepsiCo, and Unilever. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Leadership from York St John University and completed a leadership programme at Harvard Business School. He was, in every conventional measure, a senior entertainment industry executive with blue-chip credentials.