Sammy Gyamfi, chief executive of the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod), has rejected claims that the institution lost more than US$1.7bn through its gold trading operations in 2025, challenging Ghana’s Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin to produce evidence for the allegation.
Speaking at the government’s Accountability Series on Wednesday, 19 August 2026, Mr Gyamfi said GoldBod’s audited financial statements showed the organisation recorded substantial surpluses rather than losses.
“We have not made any losses as claimed by the Minority Leader,”Mr Gyamfi said. “Not a single adverse finding was made against GoldBod by the Auditor-General for the year 2025. The audited annual report and financial statements of Gold Board for the year ended December 30th 2025 disclosed an operational surplus of GH¢907 million and overall surplus of GH¢5.4 billion.”
Mr Gyamfi described Mr Afenyo-Markin’s claim as “a barefaced lie” and called on him to identify the section of the official accounts that supported his allegation.
“I challenge Afenyo-Markin to point to any page, paragraph, sentence, phrase or punctuation mark in the said referenced report to prove the loss by GoldBod,” he said.
The dispute follows a press conference held by Mr Afenyo-Markin in Parliament on Tuesday, 18 August. The Minority Leader alleged that Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, operated through GoldBod, suffered losses of more than US$1.7bn in 2025.
He put the figure at about GH¢22bn and said it represented approximately 1.5% of Ghana’s gross domestic product. Referring to the alleged losses as “structural bleeding” of the national purse, Mr Afenyo-Markin argued that they could not be explained solely by changes in market conditions.
“These losses are not bad luck. You don’t trade in gold and make losses,”he said.
Mr Afenyo-Markin also questioned whether GoldBod’s reported surplus provided a complete picture of the programme’s finances. He claimed that transaction costs linked to the gold trading activities had been absorbed by the Bank of Ghana instead of being recorded in GoldBod’s accounts.
“If the Auditor-General knows that indeed the costs of GoldBod’s transaction were borne by Bank of Ghana, Auditor-General would not declare surplus,” he said.
He called for a review of the programme’s pricing and trading arrangements and said he would bring a motion before Parliament seeking to compel GoldBod’s management to account for the alleged losses.
GoldBod, however, continues to stand by its audited accounts, which were prepared and published by the Auditor-General. The institution says those records contain no adverse finding for 2025 and show an operational surplus of GH¢907m, alongside an overall surplus of GH¢5.4bn.
The disagreement centres on the treatment of the disputed transaction costs. While Mr Afenyo-Markin argues that the costs were effectively carried by the Bank of Ghana and therefore concealed the true position of the programme, GoldBod maintains that its own audited books do not show the losses alleged by the Minority Leader.
