Anacom Sits on €440 Million of Unrevested 5G Auction Revenue Five Years After the Leilão Closed — Tesouro Transfer Still Waits on a Government Portaria That Has Never Been Signed
Five years after the 5G spectrum auction closed in October 2021 — and with most of Portuguese territory now under 5G coverage — Anacom is still holding €440 million of the auction's revenue, awaiting a government portaria that authorises transfer to the State Treasury.
The Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (Anacom) is sitting on €440 million of 5G spectrum-auction revenue almost five years after the auction closed — money that should long since have moved to the State Treasury but that remains parked in Anacom's accounts because the single government portaria required to authorise the transfer has never been signed. The figure surfaced Thursday 14 May 2026 in reporting that walked the dossier back onto the Ministério das Infraestruturas's desk.
The auction that took eleven months and produced €567 million
Portugal's 5G spectrum auction opened on 14 January 2021 and finally closed on 26 October 2021 after 1,727 individual rounds — the longest single-spectrum auction process in Anacom's history. The auction allocated frequencies in the 700 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2,1 GHz, 2,6 GHz and 3,6 GHz bands. Final aggregate revenue printed at €566.81 million, with the bulk of the bidding coming from the three incumbent mobile operators — MEO (Altice Portugal), NOS Comunicações and Vodafone Portugal — alongside Dixarobil/NOWO and Dense Air.
Of that €566.81 million headline, roughly €127 million was transferred to the Treasury under earlier ad-hoc portarias issued during the auction's tail-end. The remaining €440 million has been sitting on Anacom's balance sheet since late 2021, waiting for a single comprehensive portaria from the government to formalise the final transfer to the Tesouro.
The portaria that never arrived
Under Article 21 of the Lei das Comunicações Eletrónicas (Lei n.º 16/2022, which consolidated the older Lei 5/2004 framework), spectrum-auction revenue is collected by Anacom as the licensing authority but must be transferred to the State Treasury upon ministerial authorisation. The implementing portaria is signed jointly by the Ministério das Finanças and the Ministério das Infraestruturas — and four successive governments (two PS executives followed by the current PSD/CDS coalition) have passed through Praça do Comércio and Avenida Defensores de Chaves without signing it.
The political reading sitting around the Anacom file is that no minister wants to authorise the transfer without also clarifying what happens to the parallel contrapartidas regime — the in-kind obligations (coverage commitments, MVNO access, transparent pricing) attached to the auction licences, which Anacom has been auditing operator-by-operator and which would in theory free additional financial penalties if breached. Resolving that audit chain has consistently proved easier to defer than to legislate.
Why this matters now
The dossier returns to the foreground for three reasons. First, Anacom on Wednesday 13 May published its annual O Sector das Comunicações 2025 report, which confirmed 5G coverage on roughly 95% of Portugal's continental population — meaning the licensees have largely discharged the coverage commitments that justified holding the revenue in the first place. Second, the Ministério das Finanças under Joaquim Miranda Sarmento is preparing the OE2027 — and a €440 million extraordinary revenue line would meaningfully relieve the deficit arithmetic the IMF mission flagged on Tuesday 13 May. Third, the Conselho de Auditoria of the Banco de Portugal warned on Tuesday that the Banco's own Entrecampos sede project is creeping toward €235 million — a separate dossier, but one that has reminded the press that institutional balance-sheet items can sit unaddressed for long enough to compound.
The portaria, when it eventually lands, will close one of the longest-running open files between Anacom and the Tesouro. On the telecoms-market side, our 29 May read on ANACOM's Q1 2026 SCEE statistical bulletin — FTTH coverage at 97.4% of Portuguese homes, 5G population reach at 96.1%, DIGI Portugal at 4.1% of the mobile market in twelve months, MEO anchoring 36.8%, NOS at 30.7% and Vodafone at 20.4% on a 17.4-million-SIM base sets the latest reference.
