Fact-check: Did GoldBod make a loss in 2025? Here’s what the records show

A Minority Caucus press conference accused the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) of GH₵22 billion in losses in 2025.

GoldBod's CEO, Sammy Gyamfi, called it a "barefaced lie," pointing to an audited surplus and no mention of GoldBod losses in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) document.

JoyNews Research examined both IMF reports cited and GoldBod's audited accounts, line by line.

VERDICT:

MINORITY’S CLAIM

MISLEADING: GoldBod did not make a trading loss in 2025; its own audited accounts show a surplus. But the GH₵22 billion figure the Minority cited is real and correctly quoted from the IMF. It is the Bank of Ghana's loss under a gold-purchase programme; GoldBod served only as a paid buying agent, not a loss on GoldBod's own books.

CLAIM BY GOLDBOD CEO

TRUE: Nowhere in either IMF document, not in 47 separate mentions of "GoldBod" across the 182-page Staff Report, and not in paragraph 13 itself, does the IMF say GoldBod caused the loss, or that the loss sits on GoldBod's books.

Ghana's Minority Caucus in Parliament, led by Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin, publicly held a press conference on 18 August accusing the Ghana Gold Board (GoldBod) of "losing 22 billion Ghana cedis plus in one year," a figure it said came directly from the International Monetary Fund.

A day later, GoldBod's Chief Executive Officer, Sammy Gyamfi, appeared at the Government Accountability Series to reject the claim outright, describing it as "a barefaced lie" and pointing to GoldBod's own audited 2025 financial statements, which recorded a surplus.

Both cannot be right, or can they? JoyNews Research obtained and read in full the two IMF documents both sides have referenced: the Sixth Review Staff Report (IMF Country Report No. 26/212) and its companion Selected Issues Paper (Country Report No. 26/213, "Lessons from the Bank of Ghana's Domestic Gold Purchase Programme")—alongside GoldBod's Auditor-General-certified 2025 accounts.

Here is what they show.

The claim: "GoldBod losses" of GH₵22 billion

At the press conference, the Minority's central figure was unambiguous: a loss of US$1.7 billion, or roughly GH₵22 billion, in 2025 alone, about 1.5 percent of Ghana's entire GDP.

“The head of an institution accused of losing 22 billion Ghana cedis plus in 1 year should not be talking about our tone. He should be talking about his ledger.” — Minority Caucus press conference, 18 August 2026

The Minority went further, quoting what it said was paragraph 13 of an IMF report verbatim: that the loss was "a combination of service and assay fees paid to Gold Board, discount on gold sold to off-takers... and, most importantly, exchange rate losses from the spread between Forex Bureau rate paid to purchase gold and the CD reference rate used for BOG accounting."

JoyNews Research traced this exact quotation to paragraph 13 of the IMF Selected Issues Paper (Country Report 26/213), published in August 2026. It matches almost word-for-word.

The paragraph, reproduced below, does exist and does say what the Minority quoted it as saying.

Paragraph 13 of IMF Country Report No. 26/213 (Selected Issues Paper), page 8 — the passage the Minority quoted at its press conference.

The figures check out. The IMF confirms that Domestic Gold Purchase Programme (DGPP) losses rose from roughly US$400 million in 2024 to "over $1.7 billion (1.5 percent of GDP)" in 2025, a loss equal to 17 percent of the value of the gold the programme sold. The companion Staff Report separately confirms Ghana's central bank, the Bank of Ghana, ended 2025 with negative equity of GH₵93.8 billion, or –6.7 percent of GDP, which the Minority also cited accurately.

The catch: Whose loss is it?

Here is where the Minority's framing runs into trouble. Nowhere in either IMF document, not in 47 separate mentions of "GoldBod" across the 182-page Staff Report, and not in paragraph 13 itself, does the IMF say GoldBod caused the loss, or that the loss sits on GoldBod's books.

Paragraph 13 explicitly attributes it to "the BoG": "DGPP operations have generated significant losses for the BoG," the paper states, before listing GoldBod's fees as only one of three contributing components, alongside off-taker discounts and, "most importantly," the exchange-rate spread between the  price gold was bought at and the rate used for the central bank's own accounting.

This is the crux of GoldBod's rebuttal, and on this narrow point, it is accurate.

“No where in the under-referenced IMF reports is the GoldBod accused as having caused losses incurred by the Bank of Ghana under the Bank's DGPP... I challenge Afenyo Markin to point to any page, paragraph, sentence or phrase.”  — Sammy Gyamfi, GoldBod CEO, 19 August 2026