The IMF is the facilitator of paper gold.  It has spent recent years trying to unravel the problems created by its member CB’s, particularly the problem of preventing more than one entity carrying the same gold on its balance sheets.  The link below contains interesting discussion of this.  At footnote 5 on page 5 it is stated that “…double counting of reserve [gold] assets is not unique in gold swaps and gold deposits/loans but it can happen in other revers transactions, such as repo….”  That Issues Paper discusses this in detail making distinction between monetary gold and paper gold.  In addressing the issue of who and how to account the physical gold as an assets, it states; “the ‘monetary authority [CB] makes gold deposits [loans!] to have their bullion physically deposited with a bullion bank which may use the gold for trading puspose in world gold markets’ and ‘The ownership of the gold effectively remains with the monetary authorities [CB’s] which earn interest on the deposits [loans]…’”

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/bop/pdf/resteg11.pdf

Note the this document was prepared by the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics, dated 2006.  It is one of many issued prior to and since that date.

Hey, do you suppose the upcoming ’sale’ of IMF gold is going to go to try to rejigger the member CB’s balance sheets to cover the loaned gold that will never be repaid and is uncollateralized (swaps are collateralized, but gold loans are not required to be collateralized altho they may be).  That is to ask, if the uncollateralized loans are now being repaid with cash/securities/whatever, how else do they make the CB’s balance sheets whole?

Like every other CB gold sale announced in the past 10 years, you have not and never will hear who the buyer is and that is because it never reaches any market when they are the seller.  The physical was already sold.