Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has raised the equivalent of three billion dollars in credit facilities guaranteed by SACE, the Italian export credit agency, from a syndicate of 25 international banks. The fund announced the raising in a statement reported on 3 November 2026.
The money comes in two tranches: a dollar tranche of 1.78 billion and a green tranche of 1.035 billion euros. The two are denominated in different currencies, so the headline figure is an equivalent rather than a sum of like amounts. No tenor was disclosed and none of the 25 banks was named.
Rasees Al-Saud, head of financial institutions and investor relations in global capital finance at the fund, said that under its strategy for the period to 2030 the fund is providing its portfolio companies with greater access to global markets. Michele Pignotti, chief executive of the agency, said the initiative forms part of the agency's Push strategy, which aims to increase procurement of Italian goods and services.
Export credit as a procurement instrument
The structure is the story here, not the size. An export credit agency guarantee is not neutral capital: it is cheaper money offered on the condition that a defined share of the spend returns to the guaranteeing country's suppliers. Tying three billion dollars of sovereign fund liquidity to Italian procurement is therefore a trade policy instrument operating through a balance sheet, and it tells Italian industrial exporters where to look for Gulf orders over the next several years.
Why other agencies will follow
Saudi giga project procurement has outgrown the capacity of any single national supply base, and the competition between exporting countries for a share of it is increasingly fought through their credit agencies rather than through their trade missions. Boards in European capital goods and engineering should read this facility as a template that their own national agencies will be asked to match, and should be asking now whether their country's agency has an equivalent programme in place.
One limitation is recorded rather than glossed. The fund's own release could not be retrieved, because its site refused the request. The figures and the quotations above come from two independent named reports of that statement.
