The Minority in Parliament is demanding answers from the government and the Ghana Gold Board over what it describes as massive financial losses associated with the country’s domestic gold purchase programme.

The Minority claims the programme generated losses of about US$167 million, equivalent to GH¢22 billion, in 2025, citing findings contained in the International Monetary Fund’s latest assessment of Ghana’s economy.

Addressing a press conference, the Minority said the figure cannot be dismissed as an accounting technicality because, according to the IMF, the losses were largely linked to gold purchasing and trading operations undertaken through the programme.

The Caucus said the IMF attributed the losses to a combination of service and asset fees paid to the Gold Board, discounts on gold sold to offtakers, and exchange-rate losses arising from the difference between the rates used to purchase gold and the reference rate applied in the Bank of Ghana’s accounts.

The Minority argues that while the Gold Board may report a surplus in its own accounts, the economic losses associated with transactions conducted on behalf of the Bank of Ghana were ultimately borne by the central bank.

It is therefore demanding full disclosure of the identities of the offtakers, the pricing arrangements, discounts applied to gold sales, fees earned by the Gold Board, and the risk-sharing arrangements between the Gold Board and the Bank of Ghana.

“So here is a question GoldBod must answer. If every one of those services, service fees and asset fees were collected and kept, why should the losses that came bundled with earning them belong to someone else?” he asked. 

“You do not get to keep the fees and disown the cost. This is not accounting; that is convenience. 

“GoldBod is happy to take credit for the foreign exchange he claims to have generated. But it goes quiet the moment we ask about the very trade that discounted sales, the fee arrangement that produced that forex in the first place,” he emphasised. 

“You cannot claim the upside of a trade and disown a downside,” he added.

“We, the Minority, are not here to relegate the profit of GoldBod. The profit GoldBod has published in its own account. We are here because of what happened off the books, the operations, the fee structures, the discounted sales that made that profit possible in the first place.”

Mr Afenyo-Markin also questioned the arrangement under which the Bank of Ghana provided funds for gold purchases while allegedly carrying the resulting losses.

“GoldBod took Bank of Ghana’s money to assay gold and collect its fees. It cannot claim the credit that comes with the revenue while pushing every loss into Bank of Ghana’s balance sheets,” he said.

He argued that the arrangement had effectively separated the benefits of the transactions from the risks, leaving the central bank and ultimately the taxpayer to bear the losses.

He therefore demanded answers from GoldBod on the identities of its off-takers, the rationale for discounted gold sales and why the country’s gold trading mandate was generating losses that were not transparently disclosed.