Ghana Gold Board Chief Executive Officer Sammy Gyamfi has hit back at Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin, demanding concrete evidence linking his agency to financial losses recorded by the central bank.
Addressing critics at the Government Accountability Series, Gyamfi refuted assertions that an International Monetary Fund assessment blames GoldBod for fiscal hits sustained by the Bank of Ghana under its Domestic Gold Purchase Programme.
He pointed out how parliamentary opponents shifted their arguments after initially claiming GoldBod itself suffered heavy losses, now alleging instead that the board pushed those expenses onto the central bank.
The dispute stems from a parliamentary press briefing on Tuesday, 18 August 2026, where Afenyo-Markin argued that GoldBod’s positive balance sheet fails to capture substantial operational overhead absorbed behind the scenes.
“Yes, we concede that it is the Auditor-General who has conducted an audit, but the Auditor-General was not given access to the full picture,” Mr Afenyo-Markin stated. “If the Auditor-General knows that indeed the costs of GoldBod’s transaction were borne by the Bank of Ghana, the Auditor-General would not declare a surplus in its accounting report.”
Dismissing that narrative as political maneuvering, Gyamfi maintained that the IMF documents tell a completely different story. “I challenge Afenyo-Markin to point to any page, paragraph, sentence, phrase, or punctuation mark in the said reference reports of the IMF where the GoldBod was accused by the IMF as the entity responsible for losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana,” he said.
He added, “Their position has now conveniently changed from the old false narrative that the Gold Board made losses to the new false narrative, which is that the Gold Board is responsible for losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana under the domestic gold purchase program,” before declaring, “Ladies and gentlemen, nothing could be further from the truth.”
Clarifying the actual contents of the multilateral report, Gyamfi noted that while the central bank faced sales losses of roughly $400 million in 2024 and $1.7 billion in 2025 under the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, those shortfalls resulted directly from expanding the initiative’s overall scope rather than organizational mismanagement. “That loss was as a result of the scaling up, the expansion of the programme,” he said.
Gyamfi explained that the IMF reference to GoldBod merely accounts for standard transaction fees and valuation adjustments rather than placing fault on the board. “This is the true context within which the name of the Gold Board featured relative to losses under the DGPP,” he said, emphasizing that fee payments do not equate to institutional culpability.
He criticized commentators for making unverified assertions in public discussions without providing supporting text from the official documentation. “Most of the time, they come in the media, and they say the IMF has said that GoldBod has made a loss of $1.7 billion, and nobody questions them to point out which part of the IMF report said that,” he said. “They say that the IMF says that GoldBod is the reason for the loss, and nobody questions them to provide proof, and we are all talking about the IMF report.” To resolve the dispute, Gyamfi urged critics to quote the specific excerpts they rely on so the public can evaluate the facts in full context.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana