An Emirati Official Puts the 2025 Sudan Gold Trade at $1bn While Contesting Where It Came From
A Financial Times investigation, so far available to this desk only in Semafor’s digest, says the UAE received more than $100 million in bullion looted from Sudan’s central bank and state refinery. The Emirati response conceded the size of the trade, not its origin.
Semafor’s 4 August summary of the FT investigation states that the UAE received more than $100 million worth of gold bullion stolen by paramilitary forces from the Sudanese central bank and its state refinery, and that an Emirati official put the trade at just over $1 billion in 2025. Semafor also cites the Swiss charity Swissaid’s estimate that nearly $30 billion of undeclared artisanal gold moves from Africa to Dubai each year. This desk has read the digest, not the original: the FT’s documents, its methodology and the full UAE response are not in hand, and the two figures do different work — one is an allegation of theft, the other an admission of volume. They should not be added together or blended.
The surrounding numbers are unusually well documented for a war economy. Sudanese central bank data shared with Bloomberg in April showed about 8.2 metric tons of gold going to the UAE in 2025, down from 22.2 tons the year before. Swissaid, in November 2025, recorded 29 tonnes imported directly from Sudan in 2024, up from 17 in 2023, alongside 27 tonnes transiting Egypt, 18 from Chad and 9 from Libya. Swissinfo, citing central bank figures, reported the UAE took roughly 90 per cent of Sudan’s official gold exports in the first half of 2025. An STPT report summarised by Dabanga in April estimated that between 50 and 80 per cent of production is now smuggled, and said Khartoum’s centralisation of exports had counterproductively encouraged smuggling.
Assessment: The interesting move is the concession. An Emirati official putting the trade at over $1 billion contests provenance while conceding scale — which is the safer ground, because the sanctions architecture built so far reaches trading companies, not the state that hosts the market. Read the official export series with care in the other direction too: those tonnage collapses come from the Sudanese central bank, a belligerent’s institution with an interest in showing that the UAE channel has closed and that what remains is smuggled. Both readings can be true at once, which is precisely why the metal keeps funding both armies.