In 2024, only 188 tons of the 359 tons of gold left in the National Welfare Fund. Of these, more than 112 tons have disappeared without a trace.
Transactions with Russia’s National Welfare Fund are increasingly moving into the “shadow” mode as the “cube”, which has been saved up for years at the expense of oil super-profits, is approaching exhaustion.
In 2024, more than 100 tons of gold left the NWF as a result of transactions about which the Finance Ministry reported nothing in its monthly reports on the state of the fund, The Moscow Times found out.
According to one of the latest such reports, as of January 1, 2025, 187.7 tons of gold remained in the NWF against 358.9 tons at the beginning of the year. “Gold reserve” of the fund, thus, decreased by 171.2 tons, or 48% over the year.
At the same time, the Ministry of Finance reported about the sale of gold from the NWF only once: in December, 58.9 tons were sold, and the proceeds were “credited to the unified account of the federal budget in order to finance its deficit.”
Thus, the difference between the announced sales of gold and the actual reduction of its reserves amounted to 112.3 tons – or about a third of all the bullion that the fund had at the beginning of the year.
“Disappearance” of gold from the National Wealth Fund occurred practically every month of last year, except for January: in February – 0.9 tons, in March – 23.2 tons, in April – 0.5 tons, in May – 4.7 tons. In none of these months the Ministry of Finance reported that it sold gold to the NWF.
At the end of June-2024, it reported that 2.8 tons of gold were credited to the fund following the previous year’s purchases. However, the gold reserves in the NWF did not increase, but decreased – by 14.2 tons.
In July-2024, the NWF lost another 4.7 tons of gold, in August – 5.6 tons, in September – 1.2 tons, in October – 8.5 tons, and in November – 4 tons. As in previous months, sales of gold from the fund were not mentioned in the reports of the Ministry of Finance.
In response to a request to comment on the discrepancies, the press service of the Ministry of Finance stated that the Ministry of Finance “may sell gold by investing the received ruble funds in Russian financial assets related to the financing of self-sustaining projects and support for sectors of the domestic economy.” “These financial assets are accounted for as part of the illiquid part of the NWF,” the Finance Ministry emphasized.
The volume of such investments from the fund in 2024 amounted to 1 trillion rubles, follows from the data of the Ministry of Finance. The largest recipient of money was the state corporation Rostec – it received Br340 billion. Another Br236 billion from the NWF went to VEB, Br81 billion to Avtodor, Br78 billion to the State Transport Leasing Company and Br75 billion to Gazprombank.
Gold, along with Chinese yuan, is included in the liquid part of the NWF – that is, money that has not yet been spent, which the government uses to patch budget “holes” and injections into state companies. Since the beginning of the war, the size of this coffers has decreased by $76 billion and at the beginning of 2025 amounted to only $37.5 billion – the minimum since the fund was created in 2008.