OREANDA-NEWS. December 27, 2016. Saudi Arabia is still considering New York for a partial public stock listing of state-owned Saudi Aramco despite concerns about recently passed US legislation seen as targeting the largest Opec producer, Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said.

Saudi Arabia has periodically reviewed its "tremendously large investments in the US," most recently in the context of considering an initial public offering (IPO) of state-owned Saudi Aramco, Jubeir said yesterday. "There are issues that are associated with risk, but our objective is to increase those investments [in the US], not to decrease them," Jubeir said following a meeting in Riyadh with US secretary of state John Kerry.

Saudi Aramco said in September it was looking at the New York, London and Hong Kong stock exchanges as potential hosts for its partial IPO. The planned partial privatization — part of the Vision 2030 plan to diversify the Saudi economy — could generate as much as \\$125bn for a 5pc stake in Saudi Aramco, Riyadh estimates.

The three potential venues still are under consideration to determine "where the best market would be to launch the IPO of Aramco, or if it should be more than one market," Jubeir said yesterday. "That is still a work in progress."

Jubeir during a recent visit to Washington lobbied key members of Congress to repeal or amend legislation passed in September, nominally to help the victims of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, that allows US citizens to bring private lawsuits against Saudi Arabia over its alleged support of terrorism. Saudi officials have voiced objections over the legislation both because of its implications of support for terrorist groups, which Riyadh denies, and over the reduction of sovereign immunity protection for Saudi state-owned assets.

Senior Saudi officials earlier this year suggested that Riyadh could sell off its assets in the US if the bill became law, to avoid the risk of having them seized. But US Treasury estimates show that Saudi holdings of US government securities increased a month following the law's enactment in September.

Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) earlier this month proposed to amend the law to take into account Saudi concerns. Both voted in September to overcome President Barack Obama's veto of the legislation, as did most other members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Senior congressional Republican leaders since then publicly supported amendments to the law, but they did not advance the McCain-Graham amendment before the current Congress ended its work.

Obama said the law is detrimental to US national security interests, pointing out that foreign governments could reciprocate by allowing their own domestic courts to claim jurisdiction over US officials or assets.

The legislation "as it was written is a bad law," Kerry said yesterday.

"We obviously would welcome congressional action to clean up the rather significant mess that they have made," the White House said earlier this month. But with just a month left in Obama's final term in office, the task likely will fall to the new Congress and the next administration.

President-elect Donald Trump hailed the law following its enactment, but he has not offered much detail on his Middle East policy priorities following his election. Trump at a rally in Orlando, Florida, on 16 December promised to establish "safe zones" in Syria for the victims of the civil war in that country, adding that "we are going to get the Gulf states to pay for the safe zones." The president-elect's transition team did not clarify his comments.

Trump's nominees for key national security posts know the region well but have not clarified the new administration's priorities either. Trump nominated ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to head the State Department and former top US military commander in the Middle East, retired Marine general James Mattis, as his defense secretary.