EXCLUSIVE: São Tomé and Príncipe’s Patrice Trovoada Handed One Turkish Group His Country’s Electricity and Its Only Airport in Eight Months, the $380 Million Airport With No Tender on Record and the Power Contract the Audit Court Was Written Out Of

Two signatures, eight months apart, delivered the two most strategic assets of São Tomé and Príncipe to the same Turkish group. On 10 October 2023, the government of Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada signed an administrative investment contract with Tesla STP Unipessoal, Lda for the country’s power supply. On 9 June 2024, the same government signed a 49-year concession over Nuno Xavier International Airport, the islands’ only international airport, with FB Airport STP. Both companies belong to Turkey’s FB Group, which presents the power plant on its own site as its first investment in São Tomé. Each deal was reported at home as it happened. What has never been done, until now, is to lay the two signings side by side and read how each one was awarded.

The power contract came first, and it did not come by competition. As São Tomé’s own press reported from the audit court’s published findings in May 2025, the Tesla contract was awarded by direct adjustment, with no competitive procedure at all. The national audit court, the Tribunal de Contas, found that the contract had been signed under a law that exempted it from the court’s prior visa, although the country’s PPP law makes that approval mandatory for partnerships of this kind. The court found no prior analysis of the deal by the competent regulatory and control authorities. It costed the tax exemptions granted to Tesla STP, its subcontractors and its group companies as losses of at least €52,282,555 to the São Toméan State. And it found the country paying for power it never received: five installed generator sets that do not have the contracted 10 MW capacity and have produced about 4 MW, while the contract obliges the State to pay a fixed capacity charge on the full 10 MW, some €455,000 to €500,000 every month, and to supply the fuel for the generators whose output it then buys back. The court also found no sufficient proof that the contracted Phase 1 investment of €10.85 million was ever made. The announced programme, three phases of diesel, dual-fuel and solar generation, totals €96.942 million.

The airport contract came second, and no tender for it has ever been documented anywhere. The concession, €329 million, about US$380 million, runs for 49 years on a build-operate-transfer model: new terminals, aprons and a runway extended to 2,800 metres, in three phases rising to 1.5 million passengers a year. It was signed while the government’s own 2022 grant agreement with China, some US$100 million to rebuild the same airport, was still in effect, a point the opposition leader Jorge Bom Jesus raised at the time, as the press reported, objecting to the overlap and to the lack of transparency. So the pattern, read whole, is this. The procurement law of 2009 and the PPP law’s requirement of prior audit-court approval governed both signings. In the first, the approval was legislated away and competition never took place. In the second, the government promised to wait for the approval, and no competition has ever been shown to have taken place. A SecretsReporters review of the two awards, set side by side for the first time, finds the same shape twice: one group, one government, and the safeguards absent in both. The sequence is continental: in Mozambique, **SecretsReporters** findings show the medicines agency, the CMAM, behind a bid bond set at 96 per cent of the contract it guarded.

The sequel has been as public as the signings. Tesla STP claimed €7.5 million in arrears. The government, following the audit court’s figures, recognised €2.854 million after deducting €4.148 million already paid. On 21 August 2025, in the middle of the renegotiation, Tesla STP suspended production unilaterally. Sixty days of rationing followed, inside an energy crisis that ran past five months, while the state utility’s director accused the company of holding the country hostage. In January 2026 the Prime Minister’s government announced replacement generators bought from South Africa. And in December 2025 the Finance Minister told the national broadcaster that the government was considering annulling or revising the airport concession, citing the loss of confidence after the power cutoff. Both of Trovoada’s FB signatures are therefore under revision or annulment review by the government that succeeded his.

Patrice Trovoada left office in 2025. The contracts his government signed did not leave with him. São Tomé and Príncipe still pays the capacity charge on 10 megawatts it does not get, still waits on an airport concession its own finance minister says may have to be undone, and still has no published account of why, in the space of eight months, its electricity and its only airport were placed in the same foreign hands by the same route: negotiated, untendered, and, in the power deal’s case, deliberately placed beyond the audit court’s reach before the ink dried.

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