No fun being a Saudi Aramco investor

# No Fun Being a Saudi Aramco Investor – And Why Malta Should Care

**Valletta** – When the world’s most profitable company posts record profits of US $161 billion in a single year, you’d expect champagne corks to pop from Sliema boardrooms to Gozo farmhouses. Yet for the handful of Maltese who bought into Saudi Aramco’s 2019 IPO—lured by the promise of black-gold dividends—the party feels more like a hangover.

“I cashed in my Malta Government Stocks early, thought I’d ride the oil wave,” confesses 34-year-old software engineer Luke* from St Julian’s. “Instead, I’m glued to Bloomberg at 3 a.m., watching carbon taxes, drone strikes and human-rights headlines eat my gains.” Luke’s story is anecdotal, but it mirrors a quiet unease among local investors who dipped a toe into the planet’s largest oil producer only to find ESG (environmental, social, governance) pressures, geopolitical risk and a fast-warming Mediterranean on their doorstep.

Malta’s link to Aramco is admittedly slender—no sizeable funds here hold the stock, and our national pension scheme never touched it. Yet the symbolism is powerful. On an island where 17% of GDP still leans on energy-intensive industry and where summer sea-surface temperatures broke 29°C last August, the fossil-fuel giant’s fortunes are a distant mirror reflecting uncomfortable truths back at us.

## From Marsaxlokk to the Persian Gulf

Walk along the Marsaxlokk harbour on fish-market Sunday and you’ll hear grumbles about diesel fumes from the new power station. Now transpose that image 3,400 km east to the Saudi desert, where Aramco’s Abqaiq facility single-handedly processes 7% of global crude. When that site was hit by missiles in 2019, local petrol prices jumped 5c within days. “We felt it at the pump before we even knew where Abqaiq was,” laughs market-stall owner Rita Camilleri, wrapping a fresh *lampuki* in yesterday’s Times of Malta. “My van doesn’t run on goodwill.”

The episode underscored a reality Malta prefers to outsource: our economy still floats on hydrocarbons, even if we pretend otherwise beneath a blizzard of solar-panel subsidies. Aramco’s bumper profits, announced last month, derive from the same carbon logic that keeps our airport shuttling 7.5 million passengers a year and our cruise-liner terminals buzzing. In short, the Saudi investor’s moral maze is, indirectly, Malta’s maze too.

## ESG vs. ROI

Back in Castille Place, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana rarely misses a chance to trumpet Malta’s first “green” sovereign bond, issued in 2021. The €420 million raised finances electric buses and rooftop PV systems. Yet even here, contradictions abound: the bond’s prospectus explicitly lists “transition gas” (read: liquefied fossil methane) as a green expenditure. Meanwhile, European regulators are tightening the screws—by 2026 all EU investment funds must disclose the exact carbon footprint of their portfolios. For Maltese holders of Aramco shares, that means your supposedly passive nest-egg could soon be labelled “brown,” attracting higher capital charges and lower institutional demand.

“The writing is on the wall,” warns Dr. Marie Briguglio, environmental economist at the University of Malta. “If you’re a local investor still betting on oil super-majors, you’re betting against your own shoreline.” Her recent study projects that, under a high-emissions scenario, 2,800 Gozitan homes will face regular flooding by 2050—homes whose mortgages are often financed, at arm’s length, by the same petrodollars.

## Dividends or Destiny?

Cultural ties complicate the calculus. Malta’s older generation reveres oil as modern-day manna; British Petroleum’s 1950s offshore explorations near Gozo were celebrated with church-bell peals. Today’s youth see the same substance as an existential threat. “My nannu blesses the fuel truck like it’s the Eucharist,” jokes climate activist Martina Pace, 22, who last week glued herself to the pavement outside the Saudi-owned Corinthia Hotel in St George’s Bay demanding Aramco divestments. “I love him, but I’d rather inherit a livable planet than a share certificate.”

The protest was small—barely twenty souls—but it signals shifting sands. Even the Malta Chamber of Commerce, hardly a bastion of tree-huggers, now hosts “ESG breakfast” seminars where fund managers sip *kafè* and fret about stranded assets. Their conclusion: Maltese portfolios must halve carbon exposure within five years or risk regulatory obsolescence.

## The Last Drop

So, is there any fun left in owning a slice of Saudi Aramco? Judging by local sentiment, only if you enjoy cognitive dissonance with your *pastizzi*. The company’s gushing cash may finance future dividends, but it also finances the very climate impacts lapping at our limestone shores. For Malta—a microstate with oversized exposure to sea-level rise—the choice is starker than for larger nations buffered by hinterlands. Every *cent* of petro-profit we pocket is a cent borrowed against Valletta’s flood-prone streets and Gozo’s eroding cliffs.

Perhaps the real investment opportunity lies closer to home: retrofitting our centuries-old townhouses with insulation, floating solar farms inside the Grand Harbour, or the nascent wave-energy pilot off Ċirkewwa. These projects won’t match Aramco’s 8% yield overnight, but they might just yield something more valuable—an island we can still recognise in 2100.

Luke, for one, has had enough. Last Tuesday he sold half his Aramco stake at a slim loss and ploughed the proceeds into a local green-bond fund. “I still drive a petrol car,” he admits, “but at least my savings aren’t drilling new wells.” It’s a modest act, yet in a country where everyone knows everyone, small choices ripple like sunlight on the Mediterranean. And right now, that ripple feels infinitely more refreshing than an oil slick.

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### METADATA
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“title”: “No Fun Being a Saudi Aramco Investor: Why Malta’s Tiny Stake in Oil Giant Sparks Big Climate Fears”,
“categories”: [“Business”, “Community”],
“tags”: [“Foreign”, “climate change”, “investment”, “Saudi Aramco”, “Malta finance”],
“imageDescription”: “Split-screen photo: left shows a Maltese investor looking distressed at laptop displaying Aramco share price; right shows Marsaxlokk fishing boats with heavy fuel ship in background, under a hazy summer sky—visualising the local-global fossil-fuel dilemma.”
}
—END METADATA—