the comex gold shortage, page-29

The Third Central Bank Agreement:

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Western central banks have more than a decade-long history of gold Agreements with each other and with the private sector. The third Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA3) currently in force covers the gold sales of the Eurosystem central banks, Sweden and Switzerland. Like the previous two Agreements, CBGA3 covers a five-year period, in this case from 27 September 2009 (immediately after the second Agreement expired) to 26 September 2014.

The third Central Bank Gold Agreement reaffirmed that "gold remains an important element of global monetary reserves", as was stated in the two previous Agreements.

This Agreement also included two important departures from the prior Agreements.
First, the collective ceiling was reduced so that "annual sales will not exceed 400 tonnes and total sales over this period will not exceed 2,000 tonnes", 500 tonnes lower than the 2,500 tonnes five-year ceiling provided for in the second Agreement.
As signatories to CBGA2 had significantly undersold the permitted annual ceiling in the final two years of that Agreement, the new lower ceiling did not come as a surprise to market participants and had no impact on the gold price.
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Amounts to price-fixing, collusion amd manipulation.