Saudi's fortune comes to a princely £12.5bn

PRINCE Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi Arabian bull investor and world's fourth-richest man, has revealed in a rare interview that his total fortune stands at $23.7bn (£12.5bn).

Declaring today that his wealth grew 10% in 2004, Prince Alwaleed insisted that he was a long-term holder of his most valuable investment - a 3.9% stake in New York-listed Citigroup.

'My Citigroup shares will never be sold,' he said. At the current share price of $49, his stake is worth $10bn and provides the greatest slice of his annual dividend income, which totals more than $500m.

He has a diverse investment portfolio covering media, hotel, technology and banking stocks and his strategy has been to buy into fallen stars such as Canary Wharf, Euro Disney and Planet Hollywood and wait for an upturn in their fortunes.

Prince Alwaleed's investment in Citigroup sealed his status as a superstar bull investor. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, he invested $590m in Citicorp, which merged with Traveler's Group seven years later to create Citigroup, the world's biggest financial services group.

His investment soared almost 20-fold and is, to a great extent, responsible for the 30% annual rate of return he gets across his portfolio.

But this has been pulled down by the $345m investment he made in 1994 in troubled Paris theme park operator Euro Disney.

The company was again recently saved from the brink by a e250m (£172m) rights issue backed by the Prince and the Walt Disney Company. But he is in Euro Disney for the long haul, saying of his 10% stake: 'We will not sell it.'

He explained: "I am contrarian. When I went with Canary Wharf, everybody said 'no' but I got more than three times my money back.'

In 1995 he bought $72m of Canary Wharf stock as part of a consortium that pulled the company out of bankruptcy. He sold two-thirds of his stake in 2001 for $178m, making a 47.7% annual rate of return on the portion he sold.

Prince Alwaleed backed Morgan Stanley's takeover of the company last May but, rather than cashing out, he reinvested. His stake in Canary Wharf now stands at just over 2%.

He does not invest in oil or gas because they are too cyclical and he doesn't like their current highs because of the impact on western economies. But he is confident this will change and that 'Opec and Saudi Arabia's objective of having the price of oil in the $30s is logical and achievable in 2005'.