Gold Mafia: Deafening official silence in Ghana even after third episode

There has not yet been an official comment or statement on Gold Mafia, the revealing undercover investigation by the Investigative Unit of Al Jazeera, despite Ghana featuring very prominently. The third episode of the four-part series has so far been broadcast.

The undercover video which has shocked the world shows individuals with strong links with elected officials and scenes of couriers carrying gold and cash in and out of airports in Harare and Dubai, in what are clearly money laundering activities. The main actors are also heard in the video talking about washing money; some are government officials.

One of the main subjects in the investigation, Alistair Mathias, described in the investigation as a ‘financial architect’, was seen telling undercover reporters posing as Chinese criminals seeking to launder dirty money that he once ran the biggest gold smuggling operation in Ghana.

“In Ghana, I was the biggest at one point,” Mathias was recorded saying in the video.

Some news reports have linked Mathias directly to Guldrest Resources. The reports were about court cases involving Mathias and his partners at Guldrest Resources in Ghana. A 2014 report describing him as a Canadian businessman cites him in a $4 million fraud case which he denied. Another case was about a $9.2 million lawsuit against Mathias in both Ghana and Dubai in which Mathias was acquitted.

Ghana is the second largest producer of gold in Africa after South Africa, if Zimbabwe is juxtaposed with Ghana in the investigation, and Mathias’s remarks were critically examined, it is conceivable that gold smuggling is rampant in Ghana and the volume might be bigger than what is officially known.

In the investigation, Mathias was linked to a company in Ghana, Guldrest Resources which was one of five gold exporting companies in Ghana found in the global collaboration FinCEN Files, to have done business with Dubai-based Kaloti, a gold refiner. The FinCEN Files show that from November 9, 2011, to August 28, 2012, Guldrest Resources received 58 transactions from Kaloti totalling $83 million ($83,040,000.00) for trading in gold and purpose of the payment was stated as gold trading B/O Gold Diam Export. In another record, Guldrest Resources was listed to have received 37 transactions totalling $30.3 million ($30,368,560.00) between November 5, 2012, and April 8, 2013, also from Kaloti for gold trading.

The FinCEN Files project which reviewed suspicious activity reports in leaked documents from the US Department of the Treasury, describes an amount of $2.8 billion in suspicious payments connected to gold transactions with Kaloti. Of the amount ($124 million) $124,208,560.00 was directly linked to transactions involving the five companies in Ghana.

For instance, Fine Gold Impex Limited documents show received 55 transactions totalling $44.3 million ($44,343,467.00) which occurred from November 5, 2012, to April 10, 2013. Multiple banks were used to pay the funds, the reports said.

Vital Insight Investments received $550,000 from Kaloti in two transactions between September 28, 2011, and October 6, 2011, and the purpose of the payment was gold trading B/O Gold Diam Export.

Asanska Jewellery received 10 transactions within five months from January 23, 2012, to May 14, 2012, amounting to $10.2 million ($10,250,000.00). The funds were sent by JLM Trading FZE, according to the reports.

In July 2012, for example, Standard Chartered Bank in New York City filed a suspicious activity report for what the bank said were nearly $100 million in “suspicious wire transfers.” Within five months, the bank reported, Asanska Jewellery Ltd received $10.25 million in 10 transactions into accounts at Intercontinental Bank Ghana and Access Bank Ghana from JLM Trading FZE in Dubai. Almost half of the suspicious $100 million was sent by Kaloti to JLM Trading during the same period in 2012, according to Standard Chartered Bank.

Available data shows that Ghana lost $9 billion worth of gold through smuggling in 2019 – only four years ago.

In a 2017 article, Ghana Business News cited the then Minister of Lands and Natural Resources saying, an estimated $2.3 billion worth of illegally-mined gold left Ghana in 2016, while Ghana earned $3.2 billion from official gold exports in 2015.

Last year at a public forum organised by the Media Foundation for West Africa to discuss illicit financial flows, Mr. Abdulai Bashiru Dapilah, Head of Organized Crime and member of the illicit financial flows unit of the Ministry of Finance, who also gave the keynote address, indicated that investigations conducted by the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) on eight gold exporting companies in Ghana for the period 2019 to 2021 found a total of over $ 1.1 billion illicitly flowed out of the country.

While gold has been mined in Ghana for more than 100 years, at the end of June 2022, Ghana’s earnings from the precious metal were $3 billion.

And according to Ghana government officials, the mining sector contributes approximately 41 percent of the country’s total export earnings, 14 percent of total tax revenues, and 5.5 percent of GDP.

They also say gold contributes over 90 percent of the country’s total mineral exports and makes up 49 percent of total export value.

But considering the activities of gold smugglers – who seem to be smuggling gold out of the country with ease, the country is obviously not earning the real value of its gold, despite the social and environmental impacts of mining in the country. Communities, where gold is mined in Ghana, have much jobless youth, poor and inadequate infrastructure, and are often overwhelmed with illegal mining activities known as galamsey.

Meanwhile, in two of the countries that featured highly in the investigations, Zimbabwe and South Africa, conversations have been going on among citizens, official statements have been issued, and in some cases protests have been held demanding accountability, but in Ghana, there is a loud silence.