Argentina’s federal audit office says its review of the country’s gold reserves is unfinished, shortly after Central Bank president Santiago Bausili told the Senate that outside audits had closed clean and the reserves were fully documented.
Bausili appeared before a joint Senate committee on September 9 at a hearing on proposed changes to the Central Bank’s charter. Asked where Argentina’s gold is, he said a portion is deposited with the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and defended the arrangement as a way to earn a return on an asset that otherwise sits idle. He also told senators that the Auditoría General de la Nación, the AGN, had reviewed the 2023, 2024 and 2025 fiscal years and closed each without observations, and that its 2025 report was already available.
A report from the AGN itself, examined by La Nación and Perfil this week, says otherwise. It states that the information the Central Bank submitted is still under analysis and that the office has not concluded its review of the gold’s traceability abroad, citing delays of more than a year in receiving full documentation. The audit Bausili described as finished is, according to the auditor, still open.
Peronist senator Juliana Di Tullio accused Bausili of lying to the chamber, arguing that the gold is held in London rather than Switzerland. Opposition lawmakers have since pressed the government to repatriate the reserves outright.
Bausili has pushed back on the transparency criticism on separate grounds. He argues that publishing real-time detail on reserve positions would let market participants trade against the Central Bank’s interests, and that annual financial statements are posted on the bank’s website for anyone to review.
Governments of both major coalitions have periodically clashed over where the country’s gold should sit and who gets to verify it, and past efforts to physically repatriate reserves were treated as matters of economic sovereignty.
Bausili’s testimony came the same day the Senate advanced, with a formal committee dictamen, a bill to rewrite the Central Bank’s charter, one of several deregulation measures the Milei administration is pushing through the chamber.