The Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) has dismissed claims by the Minority that it incurred a US$1.7 billion loss from its operations under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) in 2025.
The Board described the allegation as misleading and an attempt to undermine its contribution to the economic transformation agenda of the President John Dramani Mahama-led administration.
It said, contrary to the allegation, it recorded an operational surplus of GH¢907 million and an overall profit of GH¢5.4 billion for the 2025 financial year.
GoldBod said the figures were contained in the Auditor-General’s Annual Report and Financial Statements of the Board for the year ended December 31, 2025.
Speaking to journalists at the Government Accountability Series at the Presidency in Accra yesterday, the Chief Executive Officer of GoldBod, Mr Sammy Gyamfi, challenged the Minority Leader, Mr Alexander Afenyo-Markin, to produce evidence from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) report to support his claim.
“I challenge Afenyo-Markin to point to any page, paragraph, sentence, phrase or punctuation mark in the said reference report of the IMF where the Gold Board was accused by the IMF as the entity responsible for losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana,” he said.
Mr Gyamfi was responding to claims by Mr Afenyo-Markin at a media engagement on Tuesday that the IMF, in its sixth review of Ghana’s Extended Credit Facility programme, had reported that GoldBod incurred a loss of US$1.7 billion, equivalent to about GH¢22 billion.
Mr Afenyo-Markin attributed the alleged losses to service and assay fees, discounts on gold sold to off-takers and exchange-rate differences between the rates used to purchase gold and the reference rate applied by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) for accounting purposes.
Mr Gyamfi, however, said the IMF report stated that it was the BoG that incurred losses through the sale of gold under the DGPP, amounting to US$400 million in 2024 and US$1.7 billion in 2025.
He said the IMF attributed the increase largely to the scaling up of the domestic gold purchase programme and not to incompetence or mismanagement.
According to him, the IMF identified three components of the losses, one of which was fees paid to GoldBod under the DGPP.
“That is the true context within which the name of the Gold Board featured relative to losses under the DGPP in that reference IMF report,” he said.
Mr Gyamfi explained that GoldBod’s role under the DGPP was a continuation of the mandate of the defunct Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC), under a Gold Purchase Agreement signed with the central bank in September 2023.
Under the agreement, he said, PMMC, which subsequently became GoldBod, acted as a gold-buying agent for the BoG and fully accounted for all advances it received in 2025 to purchase gold, amounting to GH¢133 billion.
“If the PMMC, which later became Gold Board, had no role in the sale of gold it purchased, then it cannot be said to be responsible for losses incurred through the sale of gold by the BoG, simply because it bought gold as a buying agent and was paid fees,” he said.
He said the DGPP was designed primarily to shore up the country’s foreign exchange reserves and support the cedi at the height of Ghana’s financial crisis, rather than to generate profits.
Under the new GoldBod Act, Mr Gyamfi said the Board had been mandated to raise capital on the financial market to purchase gold and had consequently developed a new trading model.
He said the new model began operating in March this year after GoldBod received its revolving seed capital, provided for in the 2026 Budget, on December 30, 2025.
Mr Gyamfi said GoldBod was ready to appear before Parliament to answer questions raised by the Minority and other stakeholders.
“Gold Board will remain focused on its mandates. We will continue to account transparently for our stewardship, and we will not be distracted from the important work of creating value for the people from the exploitation of the gold resources of our beloved nation,” he said.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
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