Burnham-On-Sea’s MP, David Heathcoat-Amory, clashed with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in a House of Commons debate on Thursday (January 25th).
Gordon Brown was accused of losing $4.5billion by selling gold assets when prices were low. Mr Heathcoat-Amory levelled the charge at Brown, branding the sell-off a “fiasco”.
He said the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s “recklessness” and “incompetence” showed he was unfit for further office.
But Gordon Brown hit back, saying Mr Heathcoat-Amory should be “ashamed of himself” for being part of the Conservative government during Black Wednesday.
.How Burnham’s MP clashed with Gordon Brown in the Commons:
David Heathcoat-Amory: “How much was realised from the sale of 395 tonnes of gold from the reserves between 1999 and 2002; and what would the market value be of that gold at 2006-07 prices?”
Gordon Brown: “Three hundred and ninety-five tonnes of gold were sold from the reserves between July 1999 and March 2002. The proceeds were in three tranches of $1.1 billion, $1.3 billion and $1.1—$3.5 billion in total. The purpose was a restructuring of the foreign currency and gold reserves aimed at achieving a better balanced portfolio — something that other countries are also achieving. The sterling value of the gold sold has risen to $4.2 billion, but a one-off reduction in risk of approximately 30 per cent was achieved, as measured by value at risk, and the independent National Audit Office concluded that the sale had achieved value for money.”
David Heathcoat-Amory: “As the Chancellor obviously has great difficulty in admitting the scale of this fiasco, will he confirm the Treasury’s own figure that the average price obtained during those gold sales was $275 an ounce, whereas the price today is $642 an ounce? That amounts to a total loss to the Treasury of more than $4.5 billion. As the Chancellor was warned at the time about the recklessness of those sales, does he agree that the depths of incompetence reached in that fiasco rule him out of being considered for further office?”
Gordon Brown: “What the Right Hon. Gentleman fails to tell us is that we restructured the portfolio, and what causes him most grief is the fact that one of the items that we bought was Euros, which have increased in value since the purchase, at greater benefit to the Treasury. I am not going to take any lectures from the Right Hon. Gentleman, who was a member—in fact, for a time he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Lord Lamont—of the Government who were in office when £28 billion of our reserves were sold on Black Wednesday, a total of £40 billion of reserves were sold after that, and £3.3 billion was lost to the United Kingdom. That was the biggest fiasco in history, and the Right Hon. Gentleman should be ashamed of himself.”
