Saudi Arabia says all NEOM megaprojects will go ahead as planned [Video]

Saudi Arabia’s economy minister rejected recent reports that the kingdom’s $1.5 trillion NEOM megaproject, a futuristic desert development on the Red Sea coast, is scaling back some of its plans.

“All projects are moving full steam ahead,” Faisal Al Ibrahim told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Monday at the World Economic Forum’s special meeting in Riyadh.

“We set out to do something unprecedented and we’re doing something unprecedented, and we will deliver something that’s unprecedented.”

In early April, reports emerged in Western media outlets that The Line project, a planned glass-walled city meant to stretch for 105 miles across the desert by 2030, would be a length of just 1.5 miles by that time — a reduction of 98.6%. Citing anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter, the initial report by Bloomberg said that the Saudi government’s original plan to have 1.5 million people living in The Line by 2030 was slashed to 300,000.

The …