Former High Commissioner to India, Mike Oquaye Jnr., has said that whether the $1.7billion loss sits with the Bank of Ghana or the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), there is a loss.
He says these losses should concern all Ghanaians, and critical questions should be asked.
“Whether the loss is sitting on the books of Goldbod or the Bank of Ghana, wasn’t there a loss?” he said on the Key Points on TV3 Saturday, August 22.
Prior to his comments, Senyo Hosi, an Economic Policy Analyst, had said that the losses associated with the Ghana Gold Board sit with the Bank of Ghana.
He says it cannot be placed anywhere in the books of GoldBod.
He added that the policy is a policy of the central bank and GoldBod is an agent and operator of that policy.
“There is no loss sitting on Goldbod; rather, it sits on the Bank of Ghana,” he said on the Key Points on TV3 Saturday, August 22.
Dr Adu Owusu Sarkodie, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics at the University of Ghana, also made similar remarks.
He says it cannot be a GOLDBOD issue.
However, he noted that if the GOLDBOD is taking credit for the gold reserve accumulation, then it should also share in the loss.
“The 1.7billion loss sits in the books of the BoG. But if Goldbod is claiming credit for the reserve accumulation, then it should accept blame,” he said on the Key Points on TV3 Saturday, August 22.
He further expressed the view that the issues about GOLDBOD losses have been over-politicised.
He made the point that attention should rather be focused on how to minimise the losses, not the politics of it.
“We have over-politicised this Goldbod loss. Let’s rather focus on optimisation of the cost and fixing the forex differentials,” he said.
He also stated that the Bank of Ghana and the Ghana Gold Board should have come out on the losses before the report issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
To him, the issues and confusion around the loss would have been cleared if the BoG and Goldbod had been proactive in explaining to the public prior to the IMF statement.
“We expect BoG to call some of the experts to explain the cause of the loss.
“We should have heard from BoG or Goldbod before the IMF. That would have cured the noise. We have overpoliticized the loss,” he said.
His comments come at a time when the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Gold Board, Sammy Gyamfi rejected claims that the institution withheld financial information from the Auditor-General, insisting the audit team had unrestricted access to all relevant documents when it examined GoldBod’s 2025 accounts.
Addressing journalists at the government’s Accountability Series on Wednesday, 19 August 2026, Mr Gyamfi challenged the media to verify the claim directly with the Auditor-General, insisting that every document requested by the audit team was provided and that queries raised in the management letter were satisfactorily addressed.
He said the resulting audit report contained no adverse findings against GoldBod, including on alleged losses, procurement breaches or violations of the Public Financial Management Act.
“They now claim that the Auditor-General did not have access to the full picture concerning the operations of GoldBod. This position betrays either a lack of understanding of how an external audit is conducted, or a deliberate determination to undermine yet another independent state institution when its findings do not suit their narratives,” he said.
According to the Auditor-General’s report, GoldBod recorded an operational surplus of GH¢909.7 million and an overall surplus of GH¢5.44 billion for the 2025 financial year. “We have not made any losses as claimed by the Minority Leader,” Mr Gyamfi said, describing the claim as “a bare-faced lie” and challenging Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin to “point to any page, paragraph, sentence, phrase or punctuation mark in the said referenced report to prove the loss by GoldBod.”
Mr Gyamfi’s remarks respond to a press conference held by Mr Afenyo-Markin in Parliament on Tuesday, August 18, at which the Minority Leader alleged that the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, run through GoldBod, recorded losses exceeding US$1.7 billion, about GH¢22 billion, in 2025, citing IMF Country Report No. 26/213. Mr Afenyo-Markin argued that GoldBod’s reported surplus did not tell the full story, suggesting the Auditor-General had not been given the complete picture because transaction costs were allegedly absorbed by the Bank of Ghana rather than reflected in GoldBod’s own books.
Mr Gyamfi dismissed that suggestion as unsupported by the IMF’s own findings.
“It is important for us not to attribute the IMF to what they have not said. They have not said that the GoldBod is the one that caused the Bank of Ghana to lose 1.7 billion dollars,” he said, noting that the Bank of Ghana recorded losses under the same programme before GoldBod existed.
“There was no GoldBod in 2024,” he said, referencing a separate $400 million loss the IMF report attributes to 2024. “Where in the world is one body corporate blamed for accounting losses incurred by another independent, separate and distinct body corporate without any evidentiary basis?” he asked.
