RIYADH, 31 December 2003 — Riyadh Daily, one of the Kingdom’s three English dailies, has folded. After 19 years of financial losses, the paper’s last issue appears today.

“All I can say is that it was a management decision,” Talaat Wafa, Riyadh Daily’s editor in chief, told Arab News.

He said the management would pay the newspaper employees their end-of-service benefits besides two months’ additional pay as part of the contract.

Wafa will re-join the daily’s sister publication at Al-Yamama publishing house, Al-Riyadh, where he has been managing editor and chief of the Washington Bureau.

The decision to close down Riyadh Daily ends a period of uncertainty among its employees, who were given to understand that it would continue in a truncated form of eight pages, as against 24 pages in its heyday.

“We didn’t speak to one another today, our last day. That should give you an idea of the office atmosphere as the curtain went down,” a staffer said.

Founded in 1967, Riyadh Daily was launched as a tabloid and was later converted into a broadsheet.