The Africa Policy Lens (APL) has called for an immediate and comprehensive forensic examination of the Ghana Gold Board’s purchasing and pricing model, following disclosures of more than US$1.7 billion in gold trading losses under the Government of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP).
The losses were disclosed in the International Monetary Fund’s August 2026 country report on Ghana. According to that report, almost all of them were tied to purchases of gold doré.
In a statement issued in Accra and signed by Dr. Hayford M. Ayerakwa, Director of Research and Administration at APL, the policy research group said that while the IMF recorded the losses on the books of the Bank of Ghana, GOLDBOD sits at the centre of the country’s gold purchasing and sourcing architecture and cannot be treated as a bystander.
The report indicates the Board handled sourcing operations in 2025, and describes it, by reference to sections 2 and 3(2) of the Ghana Gold Board Act, as the country’s sole gold trader.
“The critical issue is not merely the institution on whose balance sheet the losses were recorded,” the statement said, “but how those losses arose and the extent to which public funds were exposed,” it said.
APL pointed to three drivers of the losses identified in the IMF report: service and assay fees paid to the Gold Board; discounts granted to off-takers and exporters; and the spread between the forex bureau rate used to buy the gold and the cedi reference rate used for Bank of Ghana accounting.
Taken together, the report puts the costs and losses on gold traded under the DGPP in 2025 at roughly 17 per cent of the value of the gold itself. Of that, APL said, service and assay fees paid to GOLDBOD and discounts to off-takers accounted for about 1.758 percentage points. The bulk of the remainder sits with foreign-exchange-related spreads.
It is that gap, between what the gold cost to acquire and what was ultimately booked as a loss, that APL says needs unpacking.
The group also drew attention to a figure cited in the report: a World Gold Council illustrative purchasing-cost framework for artisanal and small-scale gold of 1.87 per cent, attributed to figures from the Bank of Ecuador, set against Ghana’s 14.5 per cent DGPP acquisition cost in 2025. APL said the difference is wide enough to warrant examination, while acknowledging that any such comparison has to account for differences in market structure, methodology and operating conditions.
A further question, the group said, arises from the trajectory of the costs themselves. The report indicates DGPP costs fell from 14.5 per cent to 11.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, and are projected to reach 5 per cent this year.
“What changed in the purchasing, pricing or operational structure to produce that fall, APL asked, and why was it not done earlier,?” the group asked.
The statement further set out five measures which includes a full review of GOLDBOD’s purchasing and pricing model, one that scrutinises aggregator operations, verifies what licensed buyers and miners were actually paid, audits commissions paid to aggregators and buyers, identifies every premium and cost attached to the purchases, and asks plainly whether the State got value for money.
APL also demanded an independent oversight mechanism to monitor gold pricing and purchasing volumes, with regular reporting and reconciliation of transactions as a safeguard against conflicts of interest and insider dealing; publication of all off-taker agreements, including the percentage discounts granted to individual off-takers and the commercial justification for them; and a hard look at whether GOLDBOD should be both regulator and trader, or whether commercial gold trading belongs with licensed private firms while the Board concentrates on regulation.
Finally, the group called for a clean separation between gold bought to build strategic reserves and gold bought for foreign-exchange trading, saying the two should carry distinct mandates, funding arrangements, risk frameworks, cost structures and accounting treatment.
“The timing matters,” APL argued.
Effective 1 July 2026, the IMF report indicates the Gold Board assumes full responsibility for the DGPP, with the costs borne by Government. Without an honest account of what went wrong in 2025, the group warned, Ghana risks carrying the same exposure into 2026 and beyond.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh
