Didn't Q say Waleed bin Talal was being tortured in a luxury Ritz hotel (as if that makes any sense). He paid a fine and just made a sizeable investment ($270m), which suggests he's not anticipating imprisonment anytime soon.  None of this is in contradiction.  The "prison" the Saudi Royal family was held in was a luxury hotel, they were under house arrest.  Don't know if bin Talal claimed he was tortured but there were definitely claims of torture.  To get the torture/house arrest to stop, the prisoners had to turn over large sums of money and agree not to get involved in politics.  They probably had to agree to plead guilty and if they got involved with politics later, they guilty pleas would be publicized and they would go to jail.   Now that he is out he can go back to business.  There's no contradictions and it all makes sense if you see it for what it is, an extortion racket and a consolidation of power.     In fact, this is very much the Putin Model.  Putin cracked down on open gangsterism, brought the mafias into business with the State, then he went after the oligarches.  He threw the richest man in Russian in prison and stole his company and to this day the message is clear, you can be very rich and very powerful if you work with me.  If you don't I'll take away everything you have.  This is why he hates Magnitsky sanctions so much and wanted Trump to remove them, it causes problems for the rich, powerful men who works with him because their ability to access their money beyond Putin's reach and their ability to travel the globe is affected.   It creates the motive for supporting Putin's removal and it means Putin has to find other means of keeping this group happy. Putin got to lead Russia because when worked in St. Petersburg government he controlled bank accounts used by Russian Criminal gangs and politicians.  Unity was created because these bank accounts were a shared pool of money, if you needed money you could always get some from here, but if went against the gang, they shut you off and took what you put in.  The Magnisky Act also exposed how the oligarches and government officials washed they money clean putting international investigators on their trail. That continues to this day.  A small Danish bank is Estonia is being looked at for laundering $150 billion dollars of Russian/Ex-Soviet money  $150 Billion!  Estonia GDP is 23 Billion.  To make that equivalent in the US, imagine a small bank branch in Tennessee, had 100 Trillion dollars flow through it. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/russian-and-soviet-ties-escalate-investigator-interest-in-150-billion-in-transactions-at-estonian-branch-of-danish-bank-2018-09-07?link=MW_latest_news  Investigators at Denmark’s largest bank are studying around $150 billion of transactions that flowed through its Estonian outpost between 2007 and 2015 as part of an internal money-laundering probe, according to people familiar with the matter. Much of that figure, which dwarfs Estonia’s total deposits, came from companies with ties to Russia and the former Soviet Union.