World Gold Council (WGC), the London based international body for promoting consumption of gold the world over, is itself down-sizing. WGC has closed two of its four offices at New Delhi and Kolkata in India.
WGC has two more offices at Mumbai and Chennai. Worldwide it has closed down some 11 odd offices out a total of 21 offices including India. This was part of WGC restructuring effort that involved closing down unremunerative offices.
WGC has also brought in a new chief executive officer (CEO) with the specific mandate to restructure and revive the organisation. James E Burton took over as CEO in October 2002.
This was followed by WGC downing shutter in countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea. Most of these countries now do not have any representation in the form of dedicated office.
Sources close to the development said that Burton was brought in because he was successful in designing and implementing a transformation of California Public Employees Retirement System (Calpers), a public pension system in the USA, to an innovative, service-oriented, value added organisation widely respected in the business community and seen as a global leader in pension investment.
The source also said that Calpers achieved superior returns during his era and went from being significantly under-funded in 1995 to comfortably over-funded post 2000.
WGC has also been suffering from similar problems of under funding, said sources. Although officials from WGC in India could not be contacted and emails to the WGC head office in London remained unanswered, it was gathered that WGC faced shortage of funds as some large mining companies had backed out of WGC. WGC could not run 21 offices the world over as a result.
WGC was run by funds from member mining companies numbering about 25. Its purpose was to create a demand for gold.
Unconfirmed reports suggested that many of the 25 companies backed out because many other mining companies did not join in to foot WGC
