DAKAR, June 16 (Reuters) – Ghana is losing billions of dollars in revenue annually to smuggling of its gold mining industry due to its growing artisanal gold mining activity with a large portion of the gold being exported to the United Arab Emirates, a report by non profit Swissaid has reported.
A report findings also identified an alarming difference of 229 metric tons of a trade gap amounting to 11.4 billion dollars ratio between the exportation of gold by Ghana and the imports, covering only a period of five years with the smuggled gold finding its way to Dubai.
This is the tip of the iceberg, said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at Germany-based Konrad Adenauer Foundation, who monitors insurgency and artisanal mining activities in Sahel.
Other clandestine routes that transmit the gold of Africa to the UAE are receiving little-to-no visibility when it comes to their role in smuggling the gold of Africa, such as: trickle-carried gold, in which no declaration is made in Dubai … flown in on informal flights,” are the main channels through which the informal gold comes in.
According to Swissaid report, most of the gold found in Ghana is smuggled to Togo before finding its way to Dubai and some of the bullion through porous borders into Mali through Burkina Faso.
The results by the Swissaid were termed by a senior government official at Ghana regulatory Minerals Commission as a notorious fact.
Ghana finance ministry failed to respond to a comment request.
The report observed that an attempt by the African continent, which is the largest gold producer, to impose a 3% withholding tax on artisanal gold export in 2019 boomeranged to disastrous result were declared exports became non existent and smuggling exploded.
To some extent, the trend was also reversed by the government reducing the tax to 1.5 percent in 2022 and formal exports bounced back.
Ghana In March, the finance minister removed the tax, and later on, during the year, the finance minister lavished some praise on policy reforms because of an upsurge in artisanal exports.
According to a report by Swissaid published on June 11, estimated 34 tons of the total gold production of the country in 2023 were not declared, that is similar to the total amount of artisanal production in 2023 counted officially in the country.
Ghana last year earned 11.6 billion dollars through export of gold and has increased their reforms to centralise and clean up the trade.The pattern is all over Africa with the gold producing countries clocking in lower exports than reported by the importing countries with the UAE as the most culpable as they keep the receipt books carded. Reforms, opens new tab by Dubai to ensure that smuggling of gold is limited have not paid off significantly.
More than 10 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are earninG their living through informal mining, a May UN report said, however, it is increasingly being used to finance organised crimes and armed conflicts.
According to Bright Simons of Accra-based think tank Imani Center for Policy and Education, the new government has been dealing with some governance problems that have plagued the gold sector over the years and which prior to it had been handled with a lot of neglect by the previous government, but that it had been quite slow.