Where has all Ukraine's gold gone?
Ukraine’s Central Bank chief has divulged some shocking intel: its gold stockpile has reached a new nadir - almost zero. Since the beginning of the year, gold reserves have dropped nearly 16-fold, which begs the question, where did all of it go?
"Official statistics of the National Bank show that the
amount of gold in the vaults drastically fell, and it is unclear
where it went. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold
was about $1 billion, or 8 percent of the total gold
reserves,” the head of Ukraine’s National Bank, Valeria
Gontareva, said in an interview with Ukraine’s Kharkiv
TV.
As of November 1, the latest available data, foreign currency
reserves stood at $12.6 billion, which puts Ukraine’s national
gold stockpile at just $123.6 million, ZeroHedge reported.
However, this figure contradicts the $988.7 million, which is the
level gold should stand at, if the ratio of gold to total
reserves was 8 percent.
In February, before then-President Vicktor Yanukovich was toppled, gold reserves stood at about 21 tons, according to then chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine Sergey Arbuzov.
One theory is that Ukraine decided to shift its gold reserves to the US shortly after the presidential coup when Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk held a meeting with President Obama.
At the end of February, gold stood at $1.8 billion, or about 12 percent of reserves. The Central Bank reported that reserves stood at $1.6 billion in both July and August, and $1.7 billion in September.
In October, the bank was forced to sell $874 million worth of
gold to service domestic and foreign public debts, according to
the International Monetary Fund.
One of the main functions of the National Bank of Ukraine is to
accumulate and store foreign exchange reserves and precious
metals.
In May, the previous bank head, Stepan Kubiv, said that Ukraine
planned to use part of its first tranche of International
Monetary Fund loan to boost gold and currency reserves to
stabilize the ailing currency, the hryvnia.
The IMF, which has denied Ukraine loans before due to corruption,
in April pledged $17 billion over two years to help the
country trying to closer align itself with Europe, and not
Russia.
The bank stopped supporting the currency in mid-November when it fell into complete free fall. The hryvnia has lost 50 percent of its value against the dollar since the beginning of the year.
"The devaluation of the hryvnia is now 100 percent. At the last minute, businesses began to panic. Even after the devaluation of 50 percent, which began in July, we were able to stabilize the situation, but then the war started," Gontareva said.
Ukraine’s economy has spun out of control since revolution and war gripped the country. The new government is facing rock-bottom reserves, sky-high inflation, contracting growth, natural gas shortages, and a looming default on debts.