by Ronan Manly, BullionStar:

Readers of these pages will be familiar that in addition to holding its gold bars in a HSBC vault in London, the SPDR Gold Trust (GLD), the world’s largest gold-backed ETF, at times also holds some of its gold bars in the vaults of the ‘Bank of England’ in London.

This is because while HSBC bank plc is the gold custodian of the SPDR Gold Trust (responsible for the storage and safekeeping of GLD’s gold bars), the Bank of England is one of the GLD’s gold storage sub-custodians. This ability of HSBC to use sub-custodians is an arrangement defined in the “Allocated Precious Metal Account Agreement” between HSBC (the custodian) and the Bank of New York Mellon (the Trustee of the SPDR Gold Trust).*