CEO rejects Minority’s loss claim of $1.7 billion

The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), Sammy Gyamfi, has strongly rejected claims that the state-owned gold-buying institution incurred losses of $1.7 billion in 2025, describing the allegation as a “barefaced lie”.

He consequently challenged the Minority Leader in Parliament, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, to provide evidence for his assertions as contained in an address at a previous news conference.

Speaking at the Government Accountability Series in Accra yesterday, Mr Gyamfi accused the Minority Leader and his followers of persistently peddling falsehoods about GoldBod’s financial performance on the floor of Parliament and through the media.

Audited accounts

Mr Gyamfi presented the audited Annual Report and Financial Statements of GoldBod for the year ended December 31, 2025, prepared and published by the Auditor-General of Ghana, as incontrovertible evidence of the institution’s financial health.

According to the report, GoldBod recorded an operational surplus of GH¢907 million and an overall surplus of GH¢5.4 billion.

The GoldBod CEO explained that the operational surplus of GH¢907 million reflected revenue generated from the institution’s own operations minus expenditure of approximately GH¢109 million.

The overall surplus of GH¢5.4 billion, he stated, included the GH¢4.5 billion revolving seed capital budgeted by the government in the 2025 Budget Statement as equity for the newly established GoldBod, which was credited to the institution’s accounts on or about December 30, 2025.

“Afenyo-Markin and his followers alleged on several occasions on the floor of Parliament and in the media that the Ghana Gold Board made losses in 2025. This claim is a barefaced lie which has been debunked time without number by GoldBod,” Mr Gyamfi stated.

No adverse findings

The GoldBod CEO emphasised that the Auditor-General’s Report contained no adverse findings against the institution.

“Not a single, and I repeat, not a single adverse audit finding was made by the Auditor-General in his 2025 Auditor’s Report on the GoldBod, not on imaginary or hallucinatory losses, not on procurement breaches or breaches of the Public Financial Management Act,” he said.

He challenged claims that the Auditor-General did not have access to the full picture of GoldBod’s operations, describing such assertions as either a “crass lack of understanding of how an external audit is conducted” or a “deliberate determination to undermine yet another independent state institution”.

Mr Gyamfi invited the media to verify with the Auditor-General directly that all documents requested were supplied and all queries raised in the management letter were satisfactorily answered.

IMF report misrepresented

Addressing the Minority’s reliance on the International Monetary Fund’s Country Report No. 26/213, Mr Gyamfi argued that the IMF report had been grossly misrepresented.

He said the IMF report indicated that the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) incurred losses of $1.7 billion in 2025, equivalent to about 1.5 per cent of GDP.

However, he stressed that nowhere in the report did the IMF accuse GoldBod of causing those losses.

“I challenge Afenyo-Markin to point to any page, paragraph, sentence, phrase or punctuation mark in the said referenced report of the IMF where the GoldBod was accused by the IMF as the entity responsible for losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana,” he declared.

Reading from the IMF report, Mr Gyamfi quoted the fund as stating that the 2025 loss of $1.7 billion was “as a result of the scaling up of the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme”rather than being the result of incompetence or mismanagement.

He further stated that the IMF attributed the losses to a combination of factors, including “service and assay fees paid to GoldBod, discounts on gold sold to off-takers, and most importantly, exchange rate losses from the spread between forex bureau rates paid to purchase gold and the cedi reference rates used for BoG accounting”.

Buying agent

Mr Gyamfi explained that GoldBod’s role under the DGPP in 2025 was simply a continuation of the inherited role of the defunct Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC) under a Gold Purchase Agreement signed with the Bank of Ghana in September 2023.

He clarified that under this agreement, GoldBod served only as a buying agent for the Bank of Ghana, with responsibility limited to the purchase and aggregation of gold on agreed terms.

PMMC, he said, had no role in the sale of gold, was not a signatory to any off-take agreements, and was not involved in determining selling prices or sale terms.

“PMMC, later GoldBod, fulfilled its obligations in strict accordance with the 2023 Gold Purchase Agreement and fully accounted for all advances it was given in 2025, a total of about GH¢1.33 billion,” he stated.

He argued that in commodity trading, profit was simply a function of selling price minus cost, and since GoldBod had no role in determining selling prices, it could not be held responsible for losses from the sale of gold.

The 2024 question

Pointing to the logic in the arguments of the Minority Leader, Mr Gyamfi said if losses under the DGPP were attributable to buying agents, who then caused the $400 million loss recorded by the Bank of Ghana in 2024, a year when GoldBod did not exist?

“The IMF report says that the Bank of Ghana incurred a loss of $400 million from gold sales under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme in the year 2024. Ladies and gentlemen, there was no GoldBod in the year 2024,” he said.

He said in 2024, the Bank of Ghana used the PMMC and a private company, Resafire, as buying and aggregation agents.

“If we are to accept this argument that losses under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme are attributable to buying agents, then is Afenyo-Markin saying that buying agents in 2024 caused the loss of $400 million?” he asked.

Addressing claims that fees paid to GoldBod contributed to the reported losses, Mr Gyamfi explained that the fees in question, an assay fee of 0.258 per cent and a service fee of 0.5 per cent, constituted less than one per cent of the 17 per cent loss reported by the IMF.

He stressed that both fees were not “free money” but legitimate charges for services rendered.

The assay fee approved by Parliament under the Fees and Charges Act, covers the cost of assaying services provided by the national assayer.

The service fee of 0.5 per cent, Mr Gyamfi explained, was the same fee paid to PMMC and all other aggregators of the Bank of Ghana from 2022 to 2025, covering transportation, security, insurance and smelting losses.

“The fees in question are not free money. As the name suggests, they are the standard fees charged to cover the cost of services rendered,” he said.

Parliamentary scrutiny

Mr Gyamfi concluded by challenging the Minority Leader to invite him to Parliament to answer questions on the matter.

“I’m waiting with bated breath for Afenyo-Markin’s invitation. I don’t know why he’s delaying and holding press conferences when, as Minority Leader, he can get the Public Accounts Committee to summon me tomorrow or today, and I will appear,” he said.

He also disclosed that he had reached out to the new Majority Leader, James Agalga, to facilitate an invitation if the Minority Leader delayed.