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Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) reporting principles

AngloGold Ashanti registered as an organisational stakeholder of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in 2004, and is committed to reporting in accordance with GRI's principles. GRI identifies 11 reporting principles that are deemed essential to produce a balanced and reasonable account of an organisation's economic, environmental and social performance, and resulting contribution of the organisation to sustainable development; to facilitate comparison over time and across organisations; and to credibly address issues of concern to stakeholders.

These are:

• transparency: full disclosure of the processes, procedures, and assumptions in report preparation are essential to its credibility
• inclusiveness: the reporting organisation should systematically engage its stakeholders to help focus and continually enhance the quality of its reports
• auditability: reported data and information should be recorded, compiled, analysed and disclosed in a way that would enable internal auditors or external assurance providers to attest to its reliability
• completeness: all information that is material to users for assessing the reporting organisation's economic, environmental and social performance should appear in the report in a manner consist with the declared boundaries, scope and time period
• relevance: relevance is the degree of importance assigned to a particular aspect, indicator, or piece of information, and represents the threshold at which information becomes significant enough to be reported on
• sustainability context: the reporting organisation should seek to place its performance in the larger context of ecological, social, or other limits or constraints, where such context adds significant meaning to the reported information
• accuracy: the accuracy principle refers to achieving the degree of exactness and low margin of error in reported information necessary for users to make decisions with a high degree of confidence
• neutrality: reports should avoid bias in selection and presentation of information and should strive to provide a balanced account of the reporting organisation's performance.
• comparability: the reporting organisation should maintain consistency in the boundary and scope of its reports, disclose any changes and re-state previously reported information
• clarity: the reporting organisation should remain cognisant of its stakeholder groups and should make information available in a manner that is responsive to the maximum of users while still maintaining a suitable level of detail
• timeliness: reports should provide information that meets users' needs and comports with the nature of the information itself

AngloGold Ashanti is an organisational stakeholder of GRI and, as such, has endeavoured to adopt and incorporate the GRI principles in this Report to Society 2004.

AngloGold Ashanti has endeavoured to present a fair and balanced reflection of the group's operations in 2004. The most notable feature of the past year was the business combination with Ashanti Goldfields Limited and, as far as it has been possible, these operations have been included in reporting. However, there remains a bias in reporting towards the group's South African operations as this is where the majority of the group's employees are based and where the greatest material impact has been historically.

See Scope of the Report on the inside front cover, the Letter from the chief executive officer and the Report of the Independent Assurers for further information.