Where has all Ukraine's gold gone?

Ukraine’s Central Bank chief has divulged some shocking intel: its gold stockpile has reached a new nadir - almost zero. Since the beginning of the year, gold reserves have dropped nearly 16-fold, which begs the question, where did all of it go?

"Official statistics of the National Bank show that the amount of gold in the vaults drastically fell, and it is unclear where it went. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $1 billion, or 8 percent of the total gold reserves,” the head of Ukraine’s National Bank, Valeria Gontareva, said in an interview with Ukraine’s Kharkiv TV.

As of November 1, the latest available data, foreign currency reserves stood at $12.6 billion, which puts Ukraine’s national gold stockpile at just $123.6 million, ZeroHedge reported.

However, this figure contradicts the $988.7 million, which is the level gold should stand at, if the ratio of gold to total reserves was 8 percent.

In February, before then-President Vicktor Yanukovich was toppled, gold reserves stood at about 21 tons, according to then chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine Sergey Arbuzov.

One theory is that Ukraine decided to shift its gold reserves to the US shortly after the presidential coup when Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk held a meeting with President Obama.

At the end of February, gold stood at $1.8 billion, or about 12 percent of reserves. The Central Bank reported that reserves stood at $1.6 billion in both July and August, and $1.7 billion in September.

Source: 

http://rt.com/business/207347-ukraine-gold-reserves-gone/