A Saudi Aramco plant Photo: IC

Saudi Arabia's sale of its crown jewel always risked becoming a Greek tragedy. Ever since the Gulf Kingdom in 2016 decided on a public stock offering to sell 5 percent of Saudi Aramco, its main source of revenue and the world's biggest oil producer, the interests of the seller and the anticipated horde of international investors have been on a collision course. A crash duly ensued.

Aramco's ill-starred listing has been through four distinct stages. 

The genesis of the current strife came in 2017 when Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, insisted on a $2 trillion price tag for Aramco and had investment banks and exchanges around the world competing to make that happen.

That led to stasis, as the difficulties of achieving such a valuation and accommodating Aramco's myriad environmental, social and governance headaches on a global bourse became clear. In mid-2018, things went quiet.

Bin Salman should have waited. Instead, he displayed hubris. Saudi overhauled Aramco's leadership in September and then revived its IPO, despite a drone and missile strike - reported by Reuters to have been planned by Iran - that knocked out half its oil output. 

The predictable result was a sort of nemesis. Aramco slashed its price to $1.7 trillion and, after foreign investors largely held back, cut the size of its offering from 3 percent to 1.5 percent.

Reuters has been covering all the twists and turns of Aramco's tortuous journey. That's encompassed our own stab at a discounted cash-flow valuation, ongoing probes into where the company could conceivably list, and the masochistic experiences of foreign bankers, sentenced to months of Saturday flights to Aramco headquarters in Dhahran for a demanding client with little hope of fat fees.

Aramco got its deal away, with at least some non-Saudi interest and a book that in the end attracted 4.7 times the amount on offer. But the sale has come at the cost of leveraging its own citizens, companies and neighbors. That could end badly. Either way, Bin Salman's Vision 2030 program to diversify the kingdom away from oil has had an imperfect beginning.

The author is George Hay, Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The article was first published on Reuters Breakingviews. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn