Gold Board has not made any losses – Sammy Gyamfi clarifies on G4R programme

The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board, Sammy Gyamfi, has dismissed claims that the newly established Gold Board has incurred financial losses under the Gold-for-Reserves (G4R) programme, describing such assertions as misleading and illogical.

Speaking on the News File on JoyNews, Mr Gyamfi questioned how losses could be attributed to an institution that has existed for less than a year, stressing that the G4R programme is a Bank of Ghana (BoG) initiative introduced in 2022 and fully accounted for on the central bank’s books.

“Transfer losses it is not making? Does this make sense?” he asked. “How can we transfer losses we haven’t made?”

Sammy Gyamfi explained that although the Gold Board was formally established on April 2, it inherited the operational structure of the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC) under the transitional provisions of the Gold Board Act. However, he said the PMMC framework was not fit for the expanded mandate of the Gold Board.

As a result, the institution had to undertake extensive reforms, including setting up new departments, risk and trading units, enforcement systems with police powers, and recruiting new staff. He described the board’s first seven months as a foundational phase.

“A child must learn to crawl before it walks and walk before it runs,” he said, adding that the supervising minister had directed the board to focus on institutional capacity-building while continuing existing programmes inherited from PMMC.

One such programme is the Gold-for-Reserves initiative, which Mr Gyamfi emphasised was introduced and funded by the Bank of Ghana and has always been reflected in the central bank’s financial records.

“In 2022, 2023 and 2024, the G4R accounts did not sit on the books of PMMC or any other agency. They sat on the books of the Bank of Ghana, rightly so, because it is a BoG programme,” he stated.

Addressing concerns about reported losses under the programme, Mr Gyamfi said any losses were not the result of mismanagement or incompetence by either the Gold Board or the Bank of Ghana. Rather, he explained, they were an intentional feature of the programme’s policy design.

“The G4R is a non-profit monetary policy initiative introduced to achieve price stability and build foreign exchange reserves,” he said. “Any reported loss is a product of policy design, strategic expenses incurred for superior economic benefits.”

Mr Gyamfi further provided historical context for the programme, tracing its origins to Ghana’s severe foreign exchange challenges in 2022, marked by debt distress, high inflation, sharp currency depreciation and loss of access to international capital markets.

According to him, with the government unable to borrow dollars externally, the Bank of Ghana adopted the strategy of using cedis to purchase locally mined gold, converting it into foreign exchange and supplying dollars to the market to stabilise the cedi and rebuild reserves.

“The purpose was not for the central bank to be trading old like a licensed buyer of the Gold Board trades gold buying at discounts and margins to make profits. It was about national economic stability,” he noted

He criticisied NPP who, in his view, now feign ignorance about the objectives and structure of a policy they previously supported, insisting that the Gold Board should not be blamed for outcomes arising from a central bank policy introduced before its establishment.