In January this year, the Bank of England refused to return 80 tons of gold belonging to the Venezuelan authorities. According to Bloomberg, the British Central Bank refused to return the precious metal to Caracas under pressure from Washington in the person of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Venezuela demanded the return of the gold reserves back in December last year, but the British delayed the shipment under the pretext of difficulties in obtaining insurance for an expensive cargo. And in the end, they simply refused to return the bullion, demanding that the rightful owner clarify how the Latin American country plans to dispose of the precious metal.
An open refusal to return the gold reserves to the owner country because of the "wrong" president is an exceptional case. Although scandals with such returns occur quite often.
As a rule, the USA and Great Britain are at the center of these scandals. Simply because it was with them, until recently, that dozens of countries kept the reserves - here are the main trading floors on which transactions with gold are made: the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and the London Metal Exchange (LME).
The owners of the gold store it nearby so as not to spend money on transport costs, which in the case of precious metals are very high due to expensive insurance, and decide on the multimillion-dollar costs of transporting the gold reserve in an exceptional economic or political situation.
The precedent was the return by France of its reserve from the United States in the sixties of the last century. And then the first scandal broke out.
First attempts
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The French government secretly smuggled the bulk of the gold reserve into the United States shortly before World War II, fearing an invasion by German troops. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Paris turned to the American authorities with a request to return the gold.
And he received a categorical refusal: the Americans said that the precious metal was delivered and placed in the United States by private individuals, so the bullion cannot be considered a state gold reserve. Even in spite of the fact that "private persons" acted on the direct orders of the French government.
However, at that time the gold standard was still in force and the American currency had to be exchanged for gold at a fixed rate of $ 35 per troy ounce. Taking advantage of this circumstance, French President Charles de Gaulle collected all the cash dollars that French banks had and sent them to the United States on a warship, demanding that American President Lyndon Johnson exchange green bills for precious metal at the official rate. As a result, in August 1965 4400 tons of the precious metal were returned to the vaults of the Bank of France.
After a couple of years, Germany tried to return its gold reserves from the United States, but received a harsh refusal: Washington said that the placement of German gold in the United States serves as a guarantee that American troops will be in Germany, "protecting" the Germans from a Soviet attack. And a little later, the United States abandoned the gold standard, making it impossible to repeat the de Gaulle scheme.
Confidence crisis
After that, attempts by Germany and other countries to return their gold bars from the United States and England stopped for many years - until the global financial crisis of 2008, when central banks around the world, trying to protect themselves from market shocks, began to actively buy gold.
In particular, the PRC in 2009 bought about 70 tons of gold on the London Metal Exchange. When the ingots were delivered to Beijing, Chinese experts conducted tests to ensure the purity of the precious metal: small holes were drilled in the gold bars, and the resulting chips were sent for chemical analysis. The results of the analysis turned out to be shocking - the ingots consisted of tungsten, only the outside covered with a small layer of gold.
Beijing announced its opening to the London Metal Exchange. She, in response, accused the Chinese themselves of forgery. However, representatives of the People's Bank of the People's Republic of China indicated that the bars were stamped by the US Federal Reserve and registration numbers indicating that they were stored for many years in the American Fort Knox gold depository before being sold.
After that, the parties stopped commenting on the situation, and how this conflict was resolved is still unknown. However, persistent rumors began to circulate in the financial markets that the American gold reserve is a fiction, instead of precious metal, dummies are stored in Fort Knox, and Washington and London are “selling” them to buyers around the world. After all, gold buying and selling operations take place around the world without its physical movement. Gold can be resold 10 times without leaving Fort Knox. According to stock brokers, Washington generally trades precious metal only on paper or electronic records, the buyer receives a receipt that he has a certain amount of gold. Nobody gives ingots to their hands and in general no one has seen them in their eyes for a long time.
It was impossible to refute these allegations, since the audit of American gold storage facilities was last carried out in the sixties of the last century. So soon all the business media in the world were filled with experts' speculations about whether the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England had sold the bars entrusted to them by foreign central banks.
Venezuela was the first to take advantage of this crisis of confidence: in 2011, Caracas sent the Bank of England an official demand to return the country's gold reserves - 211 tons of the precious metal.
The British responded by saying that their Central Bank holds only 99 tons of Venezuelan gold, and the rest is distributed between JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Standard Chartered and Bank of Nova Scotia. These structures are major players on the exchange market for precious metals, which only reinforced suspicions about the sale of the assets entrusted to them by the "keepers".
As a result, by the end of 2011, Hugo Chavez managed to return home 150 tons of gold, and the British left another 60 for themselves. Since then, Caracas has regularly bought the precious metal on the London Stock Exchange, increasing its quantity to 80 tons. They are now the British authorities refuse to return to their rightful owner.
Chain reaction
While Hugo Chavez was trying to get the gold reserves back from London, a new scandal erupted in the United States. In the midst of the financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund had to act as the main seller of the precious metal for central banks around the world: from September 2009 to December 2010 alone, it sold 403 tons of gold from its reserves.
In order to continue the sale, the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asked the US Federal Reserve to return to the Fund 191 tons of precious metal that had been previously deposited in Fort Knox. However, the Americans did not comply with this request, and without explanation.
Strauss-Kahn tried hard to get the gold back, but was arrested on February 14 in New York on charges of attempting to rape a maid at the Sofitel Hotel. He was immediately fired from the IMF, and Christine Lagarde became the new head of the fund.
Meanwhile, in July of the same year, a woman who accused Strauss-Kahn of violence admitted to perjury to a jury. In addition, the investigation found out that on the day of the incident, the "victim" spoke on the phone with an unknown man, discussing the reward she would receive for charges against the head of the IMF. And later, 100 thousand dollars were transferred to her account from an unidentified source.
As a result of these scandals, confidence in the Fed and the Bank of England fell to zero, and in 2013 Germany reiterated its desire to return its gold reserves from the United States. This time Berlin has had some success - by the end of 2017, the Bundesbank had transported 674 tons of the precious metal to its vaults (out of 3,370 tons of the total volume).
In 2015, the Netherlands returned 120 tons of gold reserves from the United States, and a little later, the Central Bank of Austria removed 140 tons of its gold from the Bank of England.
In 2016, Turkish President Recep Erdogan publicly declared that "it is dangerous to store gold in the United States." Over the next year, the Central Bank of Turkey took 29 tons of the precious metal from the United States Federal Reserve and exported almost 200 tons from the Bank of England.
In addition, in January 2018, Turkey bought a shipment of $ 41 million worth of gold from Venezuela, and later increased the amount of purchases of the precious metal to $ 900 million, which caused great irritation in Washington.
Earlier this year, three more tons of Venezuelan gold were bought by the United Arab Emirates-based Noor Capital. Information appeared in the American media about the possible sale of another 15 tons of Venezuelan gold in the UAE, but Noor Capital said that “there were no further deals” and would not be until the political crisis in Venezuela was resolved.
Last year, Russia ranked 5th in terms of gold reserves.
Judging by the long-term trend of increasing purchases, in a few years Russia will reach its old record. So, in 1941, the USSR had a gold reserve of 2800 tons, this is the maximum volume for the country….
