The Bank of Ghana is four months late publishing its 2025 financial statements — in violation of its own Act

The Bank of Ghana has not published its 2025 Annual Report and Financial Statements. It is now four months past the statutory deadline.

Section 58(1) of the Bank of Ghana Act 2002 (Act 612), as amended, requires the bank to submit audited accounts to the Minister of Finance within three months of the financial year end and to publish the annual report within six months. The 2025 financial year ended on 31 December 2025. The submission deadline was end of March 2026. The publication deadline is end of June 2026, which the bank could still meet.

The pattern from recent years is the problem. The 2024 statements were published on 5 June 2025, ahead of the statutory window. The 2023 statements came out in May 2024. The 2022 statements, which disclosed a GH¢60.8 billion loss from the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme, were filed on time. The bank has not missed a recent deadline until now.

What the delay may be protecting

The 2024 statements showed a GH¢9.49 billion operating loss and negative equity of GH¢61.32 billion. The Gold-for-Oil programme had cost the bank GH¢2.14 billion across 2023 and 2024, and the board withdrew from the programme on 13 March 2025 under incoming Governor Johnson Asiama.

Public disclosures since then point to potentially larger 2025 exposures. The bank booked a GH¢7.1 billion cumulative loss on the Domestic Gold Purchase Programme across 2022 to 2024 and a further $214 million in Q1 to Q3 2025 losses on artisanal and small-scale doré gold.

An unnamed source told Joy Business the bank "is trying to hide its losses."

The same statements, if filed on time, would sit alongside the BoG's argument that it sold half its gold reserves and generated $1.3 billion in profit. Those two numbers need to be in the same document for either to mean anything.

The governance question

Governor Asiama was sworn in on 25 February 2025 after being nominated by President Mahama in January. He is two months into his second year. His institutional record has so far included cutting the policy rate 1,500 basis points from 29 to 14 percent, helping drive inflation from 23.5 percent to 3.2 percent, and steering the cedi to its best Q1 performance in six years. He has also just returned from a Remit2Invest forum in Virginia pitching the diaspora on converting remittances into investment capital.