The Netherlands has moved 86 tonnes of its gold stock out of the US and Canada to London due to ‘increasing geopolitical unrest’.
By Sophia Stanford, Daily Mail
The Netherlands has moved 86 tonnes of its gold stock out of the US and Canada to London due to ‘increasing geopolitical unrest’.
The move follows alarming remarks that gold is ‘no longer safe’ in President Donald Trump‘s America.
Moving these stores to British soil would ‘spread risks’ and would ensure the ‘quickest’ opportunity for DNB to deploy the sale of gold ‘in a crisis situation,’ the bank wrote in a statement.
Gold reserves held in London could be traded more easily than those held in New York and Ottawa.
The transfer would also create a ‘more balanced distribution’ and further help strengthen the bank’s ‘crisis preparedness’.
‘We assume that we will never need to deploy the gold, but it is nevertheless necessary to strengthen our resilience and preparedness,’ said DNB President Olaf Sleijpen.
Trump’s unpredictability has been previously cited as a key reason as to why the Netherlands should remove their gold from the US.
The director of Goudwisselkantoor – a Dutch auction house that specialises in auctioning gold, jewellery, diamonds, silverware, coins and banknotes – said in January that Trump could ‘refuse to extradite [the gold reserves], impose additional tariffs, or delay the repayment for decades’.
Johan de Ruiter went on to tell Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad: ‘We must remove our gold from the US as soon as possible. It is simply no longer safe there.’
The total Dutch gold stock amounted to 612.4 tonnes and was valued at 72.2billion euros at the end of 2025, according to the DNB.
Before the deployment, the Dutch bank held 31.3 per cent of its gold in New York and 19.7 per cent in Ottawa. After the move, both countries account for 18.5 per cent of the Dutch gold reserve.
The share of gold held in London increased from 18.1 per cent to 32.1 per cent, making it the location with the largest share of Dutch gold reserves, with the bank holding 30.8 per cent of its gold in the Netherlands.
The transfer was carried out partially by buying and selling and partly by physically transferring gold, said the bank.
The bank moved more than 27 tonnes of physical gold from the United States and Canada to Zeist.
The same quantity of gold was moved from Zeist to London, preventing the melting down of gold bars.
‘By combining buying and selling and physical transport, the risks associated with physically moving a large quantity of gold have been spread,’ said the DNB.
