The Central Bank of Tunisia’s gold holdings amounted to 6.8 tons of fine gold as of December 31, 2020, or almost 523.077 thousand ounces of fine gold, which is also the equivalent of 883,660 euros.
According to information reported in the latest BCT balance sheet, gold bullion holdings are valued at the market price at the end of December, using the morning London fixing. The 105.8 MTD increase in these holdings is mainly explained by the evolution of the price of an ounce of fine gold.
Indeed, the price of the ounce rose from USD 1,523 (or USD 48.97 per gram of fine gold) at the end of December 2019 to USD 1,891.1 (or USD 60.80 per gram of fine gold) a year later, thus compensating for the decline in the dollar rate against the dinar, which fell by 4.4% from 2.80325 to 2.6786 from one year-end to the next.
Given their specific characteristics, commemorative coins are not subject to revaluation at the market price and remain valued at the official rate of 0.6498475 dinar for 1 gram of fine gold.
The increase in the quantity of commemorative coins by 45,117 grams is exclusively explained by the integration of 2,665 gold coins, previously accounted for in the “securities on deposit” account, in the bank’s gold cash balance.
Tunisia 13th largest gold reserve in the Arab world
With these small reserves, which it sometimes used during the 1960s to pay certain debtors and no longer does so, Tunisia is only in 13th place among the largest Arab gold reserves. The largest reserve is, of course, with the Saudis (323.1 tons), while Tunisia’s neighbor, Algeria has 173.6 tons and Morocco has 22.1 tons.
The gold reserves of the world’s central banks are estimated at 30,000 tons in 2012, i.e. about 20% of the world’s gold stock.
The Eurozone has 10,776 tons, the US 8,133.5 tons and Switzerland 1,040 tons.
Generally, “a gold reserve is a quantity of gold kept by a central bank or a financial institution, with the aim of securing a transaction, a credit agreement or to constitute a guarantee fund.”
In Tunisia, nothing is said about the use of this reserve, and no one imagines disposing of it, as former French President Nicolas Sarkozy did in 2004, when he decided to “liquidate”, as the press accused him of doing at the time, 500 to 700 tons, in order to be able to invest, and his operation ended with a loss of 10.2 billion euros, according to Wikipedia.
Where does the confiscated gold go?
In addition to all this, there are kilos of gold and fashioned jewelry confiscated each year by the customs services in particular.
In 2021, the Customs Guard confiscated 78 kilos of gold, in bars and jewelry. And if these quantities are generally sent to the BCT, they do not enter the reserves account, but are rather melted down and transformed into small ingots that are then resold to local jewelers, which avoids the expenditure of foreign currency to buy gold from Tunisian jewelers.
