You are here

Russia encouraging gold exports -- to ease the squeeze?

Section: Daily Dispatches

Russian Central Bank Lowered Its Gold Purchase Price to Encourage Exports, Governor Says

By Andrey Ostroukh and Elena Fabrichnaya
Reuters
Wednesday, July 3, 2019

MOSCOW -- Russia's central bank has been buying gold on the domestic market at less than the industry benchmark to encourage Russian producers to export more of the metal, the governor told Reuters.

Russia has overtaken China to become the world's fifth largest official sector holder of gold, as Western sanctions drove buying by its central bank to record highs in 2018.

... Dispatch continues below ...



ADVERTISEMENT

Glint Completes L5 Million Private Placement
and Welcomes Sprott as Strategic Investor

Company Announcement
Thursday, June 13, 2019

Glint Pay Inc. (glintpay.com), the first-mover company that enables physical gold to make instant payments using a debit Mastercard, today announced the completion of a private placement of L5 Million in London-based parent Glint Pay Ltd. The financing was led by Sprott, an alternative asset manager and a global leader in precious metal and real asset investments with approximately $8 billion in assets under management.

Founded in the United Kingdom in 2016, Glint established the first app-based account in February 2018 giving clients in Europe a low-cost way to buy, sell, and save physically allocated gold and for the first time instantly spend it via the Glint Mastercard anywhere Mastercard is accepted. Glint Pay then added multiple currency wallets, including U.S. dollars, British pounds, and euros in July 2018. The company is working on its launch into the United States. ...

... For the remainder of the announcement:

https://glintpay.com/en_us/glint-en_us/glint-completes-5-million-private...



But the central bank added a discount on May 1 to its purchase price, which was previously based on the daily London Bullion Market Association gold price. Market players had expected purchases to continue at last year's pace.

"We introduced discounts for the purchase of gold because we saw that vendors were selling gold mainly to the central bank," Governor Elvira Nabiullina said in the interview, which was cleared for publication today.

"The discount aligns domestic conditions with external ones and motivates gold producers to sell to export too," she said.

The central bank has not previously offered any detailed explanation about why it had reduced its gold price.

Since the discount was added, the bank's monthly gold purchases destined for reserves, have slowed. As of June 1, Russia's gold reserves stood at 70.4 million troy ounces, up only 200,000 ounces since the start of May, according to central bank data.

"It wasn't a special decision on our part to reduce gold purchases," Nabiullina said, adding that, although gold was relatively volatile, increasing its gold reserves helped it diversify away from U.S. dollar holdings. ...

Nabiullina denied reports the Russian central bank had taken some of Venezuela’s gold reserves to hold temporarily in Russia.

... For the remainder of the report:

https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-cenbank-gold/russia-cbank-lowered...

* * *

Join GATA here:

New Orleans Investment Conference
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel
Friday-Monday, November 1-4, 2019

https://neworleansconference.com/

* * *

Help keep GATA going

GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:

http://www.gata.org

To contribute to GATA, please visit:

http://www.gata.org/node/16