The Bank of Ghana (BoG) has officially acknowledged that its total comprehensive loss for the 2025 financial year stood at GH¢34.9 billion.
This figure validates earlier exposure by the Minority caucus after weeks of heated public debate over the true state of the central bank’s finances.
The admission comes after sustained pressure from the Minority in Parliament, led by Ofoase-Ayirebi, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah MP, who exposed the NDC Majority Caucus for deliberately downplaying the scale of the Bank’s losses,
He said they are focusing only on the GH¢15.63 billion operating loss while ignoring an additional GH¢19.32 billion recorded under Other Comprehensive Income (OCI).
In a detailed explanatory document, the central bank effectively confirmed the Minority’s central argument, stating clearly that the institution recorded an “Operating Loss of GH¢15.63 billion and Other Comprehensive Income loss of GH¢19.32 billion for 2025,” bringing the total comprehensive loss to about GH¢34.95 billion.
The acknowledgement marks a dramatic shift in the public narrative after Majority members initially dismissed the Minority’s interpretation of the Bank’s financial statements.
Earlier, government communicators and Majority MPs had insisted that the relevant figure was the GH¢15.6 billion operating loss, arguing that the OCI component merely reflected accounting adjustments arising from the appreciation of the cedi and therefore should not be treated as a direct operational loss.
But the Minority Caucus, during a lengthy press conference addressed by Kojo Oppong Nkrumah at Parliament on Monday, insisted that the full financial impact on the Bank could not be understood without adding both figures together.
“The Government and its spin doctors are trying to convince the people of Ghana that the loss is GH¢15.6 billion. We regret to tell Ghanaians that this is not true. The true operating loss of the Bank is actually GH¢34.9 billion,” Oppong Nkrumah declared.
The Minority argued that the Bank had used accounting treatments and one-off gains from gold sales to soften the appearance of the financial deterioration.
According to them, the central bank recorded a GH¢9.57 billion gain from the sale of gold reserves, which they claimed was used to reduce the headline loss figure.
They further pointed to the Bank’s audited statements, particularly the Statement of Comprehensive Income, which showed a GH¢15.63 billion operating loss alongside a GH¢19.32 billion OCI loss.
“That is the figure. That is the loss they did not want the country to see,” the Minority stated.
Now, in its official response document explaining the 2025 accounts, the Bank has openly acknowledged the two components of the losses and explained the accounting basis behind them.
The central bank said the GH¢15.63 billion operating loss was driven largely by the cost of Open Market Operations (OMO), which it used aggressively to mop up excess liquidity from the economy as part of efforts to reduce inflation and stabilise the cedi.
It also cited the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme as a major contributor to the losses, particularly due to exchange rate differentials between official Bank of Ghana rates and market rates used in purchasing gold from artisanal miners.
On the additional GH¢19.32 billion OCI loss, the Bank explained that the figure reflected exchange and revaluation losses on its foreign reserve assets following the sharp appreciation of the cedi in 2025.
According to the Bank, the cedi’s appreciation from GH¢14.70 to the dollar in 2024 to GH¢10.45 in 2025 reduced the cedi-equivalent value of its foreign-currency assets, gold reserves, and Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), thereby creating the OCI losses.
“The OCI loss is a translation effect, not a depletion of reserves,” the Bank stated.
The explanation, however, has done little to calm the political storm surrounding the financial statements.
The Minority maintains that the Bank and the government initially sought to create the impression that the losses were far smaller than they actually were.
The Opposition MPs argue that the latest clarification effectively vindicates their earlier warnings and exposes what they describe as an attempt by the Majority to manipulate public perception.
The controversy also reopens memories of the fierce political battles over the BoG’s financial health in 2023, when then-opposition NDC figures, including now government officials, described the central bank as a “crime scene” following earlier losses linked to the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP).
At the time, some NDC leaders demanded the resignation of former Governor Ernest Addison and criticised the construction of the Bank’s new headquarters amid financial losses.
Now in government, however, the NDC and its allies have defended the latest losses as the unavoidable financial cost of stabilising the economy.
The Bank of Ghana insists that despite the GH¢34.9 billion comprehensive loss and worsening negative equity position—which moved from GH¢61.32 billion to GH¢96.28 billion in 2025—it remains “policy solvent” and capable of executing its core mandate.
According to the Bank, the losses should be viewed within the broader context of macroeconomic gains achieved in 2025, including inflation falling from 23.8 per cent to 5.4 per cent, the cedi appreciating by over 40 per cent, and gross international reserves rising from US$9.11 billion to US$13.83 billion.
But the Minority insists the numbers expose deeper structural problems at the central bank and signal what it calls a dangerous reversal of the Bank’s earlier recovery path.
For the opposition, the Bank’s latest explanatory note has now settled the central issue in dispute: that the financial damage to the institution in 2025 was not merely GH¢15.6 billion, but a total comprehensive loss approaching GH¢35 billion.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.