Estonia's Central Bank has just one 11 kg gold ingot left in its vaults, Fabio Filipozzi, head of the Bank's financial markets department, has revealed, speaking to local media on the occasion of the Bank's 100th anniversary.
According to Filipozzi, the vast majority of Estonia's modest 256 kilogram (0.25 tonnes) gold bullion holdings are stored in New York City 'for security reasons,' with the policy of storing gold abroad going back 100 years to Estonian independence from Soviet Russia in 1918.
The remaining ingot has an estimated value of about half a million euros, but does not have a sufficient purity to actually be used in financial operations, making it more of a "museum piece" than a functional store of value.
Estonia's Baltic neighbours, Latvia and Lithuania, have considerably larger gold holdings of 6.6 tonnes and 5.8 tonnes, respectively.
Four of the five countries with the world's largest gold reserves are in Europe, including Germany, with 3,369.7 tonnes, Italy, with 2,451.8 tonnes, France, with 2,436 tonnes, and Russia, with 2,150 tonnes. The United States has the world's largest gold holdings, with 8,133.5 tonnes.
The storage of gold reserves in other countries can be fraught with risks, as Venezuela discovered when its authorities attempted to pull part of the country's gold out of the UK earlier this year only to be rejected. Other countries, including Iraq and Libya, have faced looting and confiscations of their reserves abroad after being invaded or bombed by NATO.