In its efforts to curb illicit financial outflows, Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has said that government will consider applying the Cocobod structure on the small scale mining industry.
This moves he believes will help reduce loses to the state from the scale of gold.
The African Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) in its recent report said Ghana loses about $2.5 billion annually through illicit financial flows as a result of sale of gold.
But taking his turn for the second day running in Parliamentary vetting, Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta said the issue of illegal sale of gold is even between US$4 to US$5 billion in Ghana.
“The issue of illicit financial inflows is about U$50 to US$70 billion in Africa. And therefore in my view it might be easily US$4 or US$5 billion – in all sort of ways – for Ghana that we need to put things in place”.
“So first, you have the small gold mining area in which we need to tighten exactly how the gold is procured and how it is taken out. So if we look at the example of Cocobod’s structure, should we be looking at something similar to the small scale gold industry so that we fund our capacity to be able to buy all the gold and therefore be responsible for exports to cut out that [illicit sale of gold] because it is alleged that the amount of gold Dubai or India will record is quite different from our exports. So maybe the Cocoa Marketing model may be an interesting one to pursue to cut out that”, he emphasised.
He further said “then on the bigger gold mining companies, basically to ensuring that they are saying etc. is witnessed, we know the exactly the purity that has been taken. If you look at the manganese industry where currently they tell us the purity, they tell us the price they earn and then they also tell us the weight that goes on; those are all verifiable.”
“And therefore we need to put into place structures to be able to determine that. I think those kind of interventions when put in place will make us realized the values that we deserve for that”, he added.
He concluded saying “these [illicit financial flows from sale of gold] have gone on for a numbers of years, we have experimented with all sorts of undercover agents, etc. I think we should be ready to come out with new policies and for these areas.
Source: mypublisher24.com