Two senior opposition lawmakers have challenged the Bank of Ghana’s (BoG) 2025 financial results, arguing separately that the central bank’s reported net loss of GH¢15.6 billion significantly understates the true scale of its financial deterioration.
Former Finance Minister and Karaga Member of Parliament Mohammed Amin Adam said the reported figure was cushioned by accounting treatment applied to proceeds from gold sales. According to him, the central bank sold approximately 18 tonnes of gold reserves, generating around GH¢40.3 billion in proceeds and recording a net gain of GH¢9.57 billion, which was then recognised in the profit and loss account rather than kept in equity.
“If these gold gains had not been recognised in the profit and loss account, the loss would have exceeded GH¢25 billion,” Amin Adam said in a Facebook post on Friday, May 1, adding that a deeper examination of the transactions could push the figure even higher.
He questioned the Bank’s justification for offloading the gold reserves as a reserve portfolio rebalancing exercise, arguing no clear macroeconomic basis existed for reducing gold holdings under prevailing policy frameworks. The central bank’s own disclosures, he noted, showed that gold sale inflows were critical to its ability to finance monetary policy operations, with sterilisation costs reaching GH¢16.73 billion in 2025.
“Gold sales were not just about reserve management; they were critical to cushioning a much larger underlying loss,” Amin Adam said, adding that using reserve assets to offset operational deficits concealed rather than resolved the underlying policy challenges.
Tano North lawmaker Gideon Boako, a member of Parliament’s Finance Committee, went further, contending that the comprehensive total loss reached GH¢34.95 billion when an additional GH¢19.32 billion charge in other comprehensive income is factored in, driven by the accounting impact of a stronger cedi on foreign-denominated assets. He said this explained why the central bank’s cumulative negative equity deteriorated from GH¢58.62 billion in 2024 to GH¢93.82 billion in 2025.
Boako also pointed to the sharp rise in Open Market Operations (OMO) costs from GH¢8.2 billion in 2024 to GH¢16.73 billion in 2025, which he described as an avoidable expense that effectively transferred income from the central bank to commercial banks, which posted strong profits over the same period.
“The central bank booked the losses while commercial banks booked the profits,” he said, calling for greater policy discipline and questioning whether the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had adequately scrutinised the BoG’s operations under Ghana’s ongoing programme.
The Bank of Ghana has attributed its losses to the cost of monetary policy interventions, exchange rate movements, and the impact of Ghana’s domestic debt restructuring, while maintaining it remains fully operational. It has also stressed that its policy solvency, meaning its capacity to conduct monetary operations, was not affected by its balance sheet position. The central bank has not responded directly to the specific claims made by either lawmaker.
