Turkey’s TAV Airports Holding and local Al-Rajhi Holding have bought the 33.3 per cent shares of Saudi Oger in Tibah Airports, the special purpose vehicle (SPV) that operates and manages the Prince Mohammed bin Abdulaziz International in Medina.

Each company now has a 50 per cent shareholding in Tibah, according to Mustafa Sani Sener, chief executive at TAV Group.

The sale of Saudi Oger’s shares in the firm was considered inevitable given its widely-reported financial troubles.

The $1.2bn Medina airport entered full operations in June 2015. The project is widely regarded as the blueprint for the ambitious plan of the General Authority of Civil Aviation (Gaca) to privatise all airports in the kingdom by 2020.

It was financed by Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB), Sabb and Arab National Bank under the supervision of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC).

TAV, in a joint venture with Al-Rajhi, has recently won three airport public-private partnership (PPP) projects in Saudi Arabia. They include building a passenger terminal at Yanbu airport, and the redevelopment of airports in Hail and Qassim.

All three PPP projects have a concession timeline of 30 years.