Indian central bank rebuts media report it sold gold reserves

The Reserve Bank of India on Wednesday denied a Bloomberg News report that said the central bank likely sold gold reserves worth roughly $12 billion in the two weeks through May 22.

The RBI said in a statement its physical stock of the precious metal remains unchanged at 880.52 tonnes.

“The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come across reports in certain sections of the media about RBI’s sale of gold. The RBI emphasizes that these reports are not correct,” the central bank said.

A Bloomberg Economics analysis based on publicly available data showed that the RBI likely sold gold reserves worth roughly $12 billion in the two weeks through May 22, while buying $7.5 billion of foreign-currency assets.

India’s Press Information Bureau in a post on X called the media report “fake” and said the physical stock of the precious metal remained unchanged.

Indian banks resume bullion imports after month-long halt over 3% levy, sources say

The country’s foreign exchange reserves fell to a more than one-year low of $681.4 billion in the week ended May 22, from $688.89 billion a week earlier, the RBI data showed on Friday.

The $7.5 billion decline was largely due to a $4.5 billion fall in the value of the central bank’s gold holdings, week-on-week. The value of the RBI’s foreign currency assets also shrank by nearly $3 billion to $543 billion, the data showed.

In the week to which the FX data pertains, the rupee slid to a record low of 96.96 per dollar before being shored up by firm RBI intervention over multiple trading sessions, traders said.