Did GoldBod lose GH¢22 billion? Parliament’s minority and GoldBod’s CEO are telling two different stories
An IMF report on Ghana’s economic programme identified losses connected to the country’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) of roughly US$1.7 billion in 2025, equivalent to approximately GH¢22 billion, or about 1.5 percent of Ghana’s GDP, according to the IMF’s own report as cited by ModernGhana, GhanaWeb and multiple other outlets.
The IMF also reported the Bank of Ghana‘s negative equity position reached 6.7 percent of GDP by the end of 2025, and recommended a “permanent cessation of quasi-fiscal operations” alongside “the complete transfer of the DGPP to the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod),” per that same reporting.
That much is drawn directly from the IMF’s published findings. What is genuinely disputed is who the IMF says bears responsibility for that loss, and what it means for GoldBod specifically.
The Minority’s Position
Speaking at a press conference in Parliament House on August 19, 2026, Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin said the loss figure came from the IMF’s Country Report No. 26/213 and represented public money that Ghanaians deserved an accounting for, according to Graphic Online and Ghana MPS reporting on the press conference.
“You don’t trade in gold and make losses. No serious institution loses this much money by accident,” Afenyo-Markin said, according to the Ghana MPS report of the press conference. “This is what happens when an untouchable few are handed Ghana’s gold with no one watching and no one willing to ask questions.”
Afenyo-Markin further said, per the same report: “The IMF tells us that 17% of the value of every ounce of gold sold by the Bank of Ghana simply disappeared. It vanished through the rate paid to miners and the rate used in the books. This is a structural bleeding of our national purse.”
He also raised a structural question about how GoldBod and the Bank of Ghana share risk, asking whether it was prudent for one institution to buy, aggregate and export the gold while a separate institution, the Bank of Ghana, supplies the capital and absorbs most of the financial risk, according to the Ghana MPS account.
Separately, according to the Ghanaian Times, Afenyo-Markin said the Minority’s concerns were “not politically motivated” and that Ghanaians “deserved clear information on how public funds were being used.”
Five Minority MPs filed a formal motion on August 20, 2026 asking the Speaker to establish an ad hoc parliamentary committee to investigate, according to reporting by The Rio Times. A near-identical motion was rejected by voice vote on March 27, 2026, per the same report.
GoldBod’s Response
GoldBod Chief Executive Officer Sammy Gyamfi directly disputed the Minority’s framing at the Government Accountability Series at the Presidency in Accra on August 19, 2026, according to the Ghanaian Times and allAfrica.com, both citing the same event.
“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,” Gyamfi said, according to the Ghanaian Times report.
Gyamfi’s account of the IMF report differs specifically on attribution: he said the report states it was the Bank of Ghana, not GoldBod, that incurred losses through gold sales under the DGPP — US$400 million in 2024 and US$1.7 billion in 2025 — and that the IMF attributed the increase to the scaling up of the programme rather than to mismanagement, according to the Ghanaian Times report.
GoldBod separately stated it recorded an operational surplus of GH¢907 million and an overall profit of GH¢5.4 billion for the 2025 financial year, figures it says are contained in the Auditor-General’s Annual Report and the Board’s own financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, per the Ghanaian Times report.
Gyamfi has also described the Minority’s allegations as “blatant lies being persistently peddled that the GoldBod has made losses,” according to Graphic Online’s reporting on the same press conference.
Where the Two Accounts Actually Diverge
Reading both sides’ own statements side by side, the dispute is not primarily about the GH¢22 billion figure’s existence — both sides cite the same IMF report and broadly similar numbers.
It is about attribution: whether that loss sits on the Bank of Ghana’s books as a cost of running the DGPP, as Gyamfi contends, or whether it should be understood as a loss caused by GoldBod’s conduct within that programme, as the Minority contends. It is also about scope: GoldBod’s cited profit figures reportedly relate to its own operational accounts, not necessarily the specific DGPP loss figure the IMF report addresses, a distinction neither side’s public statements fully resolves.
Underlining how unsettled the numbers themselves are, at least one further figure has circulated: Agence Ecofin reported on August 6, 2026 that the IMF separately put Bank of Ghana operating losses specifically on artisanal gold purchases at US$1.9 billion for 2025, a different measure from the programme-level GH¢22 billion figure, according to reporting by The Rio Times, which cautioned that the two figures “should not be merged or averaged.”
What Happens Next
Parliament was expected to take up the Minority’s renewed motion for an ad hoc investigative committee when it resumed on August 24, 2026, according to The Rio Times.
Whether that committee is constituted, and what access it would have to the underlying IMF documentation and GoldBod’s audited accounts, will determine whether this dispute moves from competing press conferences toward a documented, independently reviewed account of what actually happened.
