Annual payments for the life of the asset. Officially, no debt.
On 8 October Jalisco’s Congress received the initiative to build the replacement Chapala–Guadalajara aqueduct and pay for it through a multi-year budget scheme: annual payments over the project’s useful life, authorised by Congress. The presentation was explicit: “no debt or contingent credits” are contracted.
This is not a trick, and it can be the right tool: a multi-year appropriation voted by the legislature is more honest than a guarantee nobody votes on. The question is where it shows up next year — in the multi-year budget, in the debt limit, or nowhere.
A private contract. A State guarantee. 97% public money.
Tina River is a textbook PPP: a 15 MW hydro plant built and run by private sponsors, power sold to the state utility under a 34-year PPA, and a government guarantee agreement signed by the Ministry of Finance. On 14 October the World Bank disclosed its restructuring: cost up from US$241.9m to US$318.1m, commercial operation moved from 2024 to February 2028.
The government is filling the gap with grants and concessional loans “to minimize additional sovereign borrowing and limit the associated impact on tariff”. Sensible. It also shows who carried the construction risk.
More than half the power bill is paying for capacity.
Pakistan’s single buyer filed its 2027 forecast on 12 October; the regulator hears it on 3 November. Of the Rs 3.55 trillion it expects to pay for power, Rs 1.91 trillion is capacity charges: fixed payments under long-term power purchase agreements, owed whether the plants run or not.
And it moves with the rupee. In the filing’s own words, the capacity price is “primarily sensitive to US$/PKR exchange rate, KIBOR/SOFR rate and Local and International inflation”. A firm, dollar-sensitive, decades-long commitment — carried in the tariff, not the debt.
Egypt wants PPPs that don’t need a sovereign signature.
Many of its infrastructure projects “require sovereign guarantees to reach financial close”, the World Bank notes, amid “increasing pressure to contain sovereign guarantees and contingent liabilities”. The answer it is preparing with the Bank: a commercially managed guarantee company, rated AAA on the local scale, offering off-taker, termination and debt-service guarantees in local currency — for renewables, transmission, desalination and wastewater.
The risk does not vanish: the State still owns part of the guarantor. But it is capitalised, capped and priced up front, instead of written one PPP at a time. The Board decides in December.
Senegal’s debt didn’t grow 26 points. It was found.
The IMF’s October Global Financial Stability Report, released at the Annual Meetings: after a 2024 audit, Senegal’s central government debt for 2023 was restated from about 74% to 100% of GDP. Later vintages added roughly US$2 billion of unreported bilateral disbursements on project commitments that had already been disclosed.
The Fund’s diagnosis is general: statistics “capture the cash raised but not the full exposure”. And in the IMF–World Bank framework for low-income countries, PPPs are covered by a stress test, not the baseline debt — and less than a third of debt analyses include non-guaranteed SOE debt.
A PPP is a payment promise. Count it the day you sign it.
Jalisco voted the payments and called them no debt. Tina River put a private name on public money. Pakistan pays for capacity whether it runs or not, indexed to a currency it does not print. Egypt is building a guarantor so it can stop signing guarantees. Different instruments, one rule: the commitment exists from signature — whether or not the statistics see it.
How much of your PPP programme would an audit find?