Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons, has raised concerns over weak safeguards in the Bank of Ghana’s gold purchase and trading operations, warning that gaps in the system are contributing to mounting financial losses.

This comes on the back of the over 15 billion cedi loss recorded by the Bank of Ghana in its 2025 financials.

Speaking on The Point of View on Channel One TV with Bernard Avle on Monday, May 4, 2026, Bright Simons pointed to structural inefficiencies in how the central bank is handling gold transactions as part of its reserve and liquidity management strategy.

According to him, the Bank’s aggressive push to accumulate and trade gold to support foreign exchange reserves is being executed without the necessary institutional guardrails typically seen in commodity trading.

He explained that, unlike established commodity traders, the central bank appears to be operating without robust systems for testing, pricing, and timing transactions—creating exposure to losses when discrepancies arise between expected and actual gold quality, or when market conditions shift.

Bright Simons further indicated that the urgency to generate foreign exchange liquidity has forced the Bank into hurried transactions, including discounting gold sales to secure quick inflows, a practice that could erode value over time.

He warned that while the objective may not be profit-making, the absence of safeguards increases the risk of avoidable losses, ultimately worsening the central bank’s balance sheet position.

“But the general point is that as the Bank of Ghana has changed its policy stance and become more central to the forex market, its demand for gold has increased. And therefore, there is a consistent need for us to buy the gold, sell the gold and make profit,” he said.

He added that: “And then because we are not really timing the market, because you always need the dollars, we have these mismatches around how much we buy the gold for and how much we sell the gold.”

“We have this thing where because we want the people that are buying the gold from us to give us the money quickly, etc., we give them discounts. We have this situation where even though we don’t have our infrastructure for testing the gold we are buying effectively, we have to make a certain declaration, claiming that there is an amount of gold in there. When they test it and they find out there is less, they then bail it to us.”

The concerns add a new dimension to the debate around the Bank of Ghana’s financial health, shifting attention from headline losses to the underlying systems and controls driving those outcomes.