An FT Investigation Puts $100m of Looted Sudanese Gold in the UAE, and an Emirati Official Says the Trade Was a Billion
The war’s financing runs through a market the Quad’s four members include. Between half and four-fifths of Sudan’s gold output is now reported as smuggled.
The Financial Times reported on 4 August that the United Arab Emirates received more than $100 million in gold bullion stolen by the RSF from Sudan’s central bank and the state refinery, according to a summary of the investigation published by Semafor. An Emirati official put UAE–Sudan gold trade at just over $1 billion in 2025; that figure is attributed to an unnamed official and rests on the FT’s sourcing rather than on any published Emirati account. The direct trade line is documented separately: SWISSAID, using UN Comtrade data on 30 April, recorded the UAE importing 29 tonnes of gold directly from Sudan in 2024, up from 17 tonnes in 2023, alongside 27 tonnes from Egypt, 18 from Chad and 9 from Libya — a set of transit jurisdictions that surrounds the war.
The leakage is not confined to RSF-held ground. The Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, reported by Dabanga on 7 April, found that between 50 and 80 per cent of Sudan’s gold production is now smuggled, and argued that Port Sudan’s centralisation of gold exports “counterproductively encouraged smuggling.” A Sudan Tribune investigation datelined Juba on 6 August traced smuggled Sudanese gold laundered through South Sudan into legal exports bound for Dubai; its key sourcing is one Juba trader speaking anonymously under changed initials plus an eyewitness account corroborated by three sources familiar with a specific RSF seizure, and the RSF denies involvement. The RSF’s own line, given to Sudan Tribune in November 2025 by an aligned official, was that “the Port Sudan gang is trying to cover up its own disputes with the UAE.”
Assessment: This is the constraint the diplomacy has not touched. Massad Boulos said on 3 February that the Quad had a peace document acceptable to both parties and set a $1.5 billion fundraising goal; the Quad’s members are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the United States, and two of those states appear in the gold data as destination and transit. A truce that leaves the export channel intact asks both belligerents to give up territory while keeping their revenue, which is why the three-month-truce architecture has produced paper and not a ceasefire. Distrust the precise dollar figures: the $1bn rests on one unnamed Emirati official, and smuggled volumes are inferred from mirror trade statistics, not measured.