Shafaq News / The Central Bank of Iraq was the largest purchaser of gold in June, adding 34t to its gold reserves, to become the 34th country with the largest gold reserves in the world.

This is Iraq’s first addition since September 2018 (7t) and lifts total gold reserves to 130t, 11% of total reserves.

Uzbekistan (9t), Turkey (8t), Kazakhstan (4t) and India (4t), all regular buyers, were the other significant purchases during the month.

In all, central bank net purchases for Q2 stand at 180t, pushing the H1 total to 270t as reported in our recently published Gold Demand Trends. This is a continuation of the strong buying that we saw last year and we now expect full-year central bank demand for 2022 to be on a par with 2021 levels.

The U.S. tops the list of the countries with the largest gold reserves with 8133t, followed by Germany 3355t, and Italy 2451t.