The Bank of England refuses to explain what appears to be a huge discrepancy in its accounting of the gold it holds in custody, a difference of as much as 1,200 tonnes between the total reported in the bank’s annual report in February and the total reported in a “virtual tour” of the bank posted this month at the bank’s Internet site.
By Chris Powell
Note by Lars Schall:
Yesterday, I wrote the following to the Bank of England:
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,my name is Lars Schall, I am a freelance journalist for finance from Germany.
Related to this news item posted at the web site of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, GATA:
http://www.gata.org/node/12854,
I would like to ask if it’s true, as Mr. Alasdair Macleod said, that there has been a big reduction in the bank’s gold holdings from the bank’s annual report in February to the “more than 400,000 bars” now claimed in the “virtual tour” on the bank’s Internet site? Moreover, I would like to ask specifically if you could tell me the gold holdings reported in the annual report and the gold holdings currently or on a recent date?
Kind regards,Lars Schall.
I received today an answer from the press office of the Bank of England. However, I am not allowed to quote from that e-mail, since it said at the beginning: NOT FOR QUOTATION OR ATTRIBUTION. Yet, take a look at this post by GATA’s Chris Powell; what I got confidentially, he got officially…
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
The Bank of England refuses to explain what appears to be a huge discrepancy in its accounting of the gold it holds in custody, a difference of as much as 1,200 tonnes between the total reported in the bank’s annual report in February and the total reported in a “virtual tour” of the bank posted this month at the bank’s Internet site:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/info/virtualtourapp.aspx