Tuesday, September 30, 2008

What Diamond Vendors Do Not Want You To Know

The Blind Leading The Blind
GIA Diamond Grading reports are NOT guaranteed.
Anyone selling a GIA graded diamond is a potential GIA briber.
Those diamond vendors who continue to sell GIA graded diamonds
are endorsing GIA and are not to be trusted.
IN AUSTRALIA
ALWAYS VERIFY THE ACCURACY OF YOUR DIAMOND'S GRADING
PRIOR TO PURCHASE
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GIA " The Internet Certificate " for Drop Shippers

In light of the GIA bribery scandal ," Certifigate " , and our strong support of Chaim Even-Zohar's revelations Diamond Imports refuse to stock ANY NEW GIA graded diamonds offered to Diamond Imports both for ethical reasons and many inaccurate diamond colour and clarity grades.

Likewise anyone dealing in GIA graded diamonds is NOT someone we wish to deal with until GIA’s Gem Trade Laboratory decides to disclose the bribers' names and comes clean in order to inadvertently avoid dealing with a GIA briber.

Diamond vendors can not be absolved of any wrong doing hiding behind a diamond grading report recognised or unrecognised.

They have both a moral and ethical duty of care to their clients

GIA is NOT an International Diamond Council diamond grading laboratory.

Their colour grading standards are simply not as strict and Diamond Imports is not prepared to jeopardise their reputation unlike other diamond vendors who sell any diamond just for the sake of closing a sale.

With the advent of the ever growing internet diamond retail market the concept of drop shipping has become prevalent.

Drop shipping has enabled websites to give the appearance of a fully stocked retail business without the costs, overheads, knowledge or experience associated with running a business.

Drop shipping has opened the door for many new dealers, markets and also scams.

A lot of these drop shippers advertise GIA graded diamonds that are not in stock and do so to add false credibility to their websites.

Hence now why GIA grading reports are now being referred as the Internet Certificate , a common report for the most ordinary diamond vendors marketing to the most mediocre clients.

The only difference is professional diamantaires do NOT trust GIA reports, carry real stock and show the greatest respect to those diamond buyers who have done their own research prior to purchasing their chosen diamond.

Diamond Imports has a duty of care to their clients and if GIA's is living off their past reputation we no longer trust GIA's integrity until the disclosure of the names of the GIA bribers.

Ask yourself why would an Australian diamond vendor promote a potentially corrupt and inferior foreign diamond grading report?

The diamond vendors who sell GIA graded diamonds rarely inform the diamond buyer that GIA diamond grading reports are NOT guaranteed.

Diamond vendors are professionally liable when selling the diamond consumer a diamond and can NOT hide behind a diamond grading report or diamond certificate

Additional Reading:

Diamonds: Undercutting Prices & Deceptive Websites

Diamond website vendors pretending to be expert specialists with very little to no expertise in diamond education or technology, often market virtual or "ghost" diamonds they do not stock.

These rogue traders and drop shippers are offering to sell these "invisible" diamonds at ridiculously cheap prices often making legitimate ethical jewellers and genuine diamond specialists appear overpriced.

On numerous occasions both the Diamond Certification Laboratory of Australia ( DCLA) and lately the Jewellers Association of Australia have combined forces and issued an industry alert about these cheap diamonds.

Many of these internet diamond retailers do not inspect ordered diamonds until the they are paid for by the buyer and continue to hide behind very questionable diamond grading reports with inaccurate gradings.

These are often the diamonds with overseas diamond certificates rejected by diamond merchants for being inferior with exaggerated grades.

These bluff diamonds can not be sold via traditional channels, often are over graded, over valued and may be treated without disclosure listed for sale at unbeatable low prices.

Real jewellers then seem undeservedly overpriced and are unable to compete against this unethical practice.

The Jewellers Association of Australia have issued a warning about both EGL and GIA diamond grading reports from overseas.

Read The Real Truth about GIA diamond grading reports here

NAME THE GIA BRIBERS

Press Release
Jewellers Association of Australia

Suite 33, Level 8, 99 York Street

Sydney NSW 2000. Australia

Phone.+61 (2) 9262 2862 fax.+61 (2) 9262 2541
freecall.1800 657 762
Email: info@jaa.com.au
web. http://www.jaa.com.au/
abn: 48 000 024 162
22nd August 2008

Industry Alert

It has come to our attention that there are a number of certificated diamonds in circulation in Australia and overseas where the certificate overstates the colour and clarity by more than one grading difference.

These stones are being offered mainly via the internet but we have seen cases of traditional retailers offering them for sale as well.

The main laboratory issuing these certificates is the European Grading Laboratory (EGL).
There are a number of EGL laboratories located around the world and it would appear that the EGL facility in Israel is the primary source of the over stated certificates.

However the EGL certificates do not appear to list the address of the EGL facility that produced the certificate and so all EGL certificates should be treated with the greatest care.

In addition there are a number of diamonds being offered on the internet at extremely low prices and which are accompanied by GIA grading certificates.

We wish to bring to your attention that in many instances these stones are also over graded.
Australia and some other countries are being used by some dealers to “dump” GIA graded stones which have been over graded in error.

We would stress that the vast majority of GIA certificated diamonds have the correct gradings and should not give rise for concern.

Please be aware that no supplier or retailer can “hide” behind a diamond grading certificate. The certificate will afford you no protection if it is incorrect.

As a diamond dealer or retail jeweller you are deemed to have the professional knowledge to be able to tell if a diamond has been over graded.

If you do not have this knowledge then you are strongly urged to deal with professional and reputable suppliers.

A jeweller using a certificate or any document or making any statement – written or verbal – to promote or sell a product must tell the truth.

It’s as simple as that!

If you do not, regardless of whether a customer has been deceived or not, you will breach the deceptive and misleading conduct provisions of the Trade Practices Act and be liable for severe financial penalties as well as injunctive relief to stop the conduct, provide corrective advertising, provide onerous undertakings to the ACCC, set up a compliance programme, damages, etc.

Please be aware that if you are offered a certificated diamond at a price that looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Ian Hadassin, CEO JAA

End of Press Release.

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" The Diamond Dealers Club South Africa rule provides for one clarity and one colour grade latitude in classification to it's members.Any further latitude entitles the DDCSA to take action as they have done in the past against any offending members.The notice served to confirm that when a member sells a diamond, they cannot legally hide behind an inaccurate classification they know to be wrong."
25th April 2008 Inaccurate Diamond Grading Certificates, Memorandum from Diamond Dealers Club South Africa.

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"Don't do any injustice in judgment; in dimension, weights or volume. Right scales, right weights, right dry measure and right wet measure shall you have; I am the Lord your G-d who took you out of the land of Egypt." (Leviticus 19:35-36.)

Our Talmudic sages tell us that in all of our dealings we are forbidden from deceiving others, leading them to believe they obtain a benefit from someone beyond the person's actual effort. Such deception is called geneivat data, literally "stealing judgment".
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When people are improperly informed, their judgment is not exercised freely.

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DO NOT TAKE THE GIA GAMBLE !

GIA Royalty & Religion - Why Some Dealers Avoid Both.

Non Compliant Diamond Grading Laboratories in Australia

Beware:GIA Diamond Grading Reports

RISKY CORRUPT GIA DIAMOND GRADING REPORTS
GIA Hypocrisy Again

***

Diamond Imports
http://www.diamondimports.com.au/pages.php?pageid=35
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Today in History 1938

Chamberlain declares ‘peace in our time’

Having the previous day signed the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler; British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain triumphantly returns to Britain claiming to have negotiated, ‘peace with honour’ and declares, ‘I believe it is peace in our time.’
In the summer of 1938, Hitler began openly to support the demands of Germans living in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia for closer ties with Germany. The Czechoslovakian government opposed this threat to its sovereignty, especially after Hitler demanded the immediate accession of the Sudetenland region to Germany. On 23rd September, Czechoslovakia called for mobilisation and war seemed imminent. Chamberlain and the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, unprepared for the outbreak of hostilities, travelled to Munich, where they, along with Italian leader Benito Mussolini, agreed to Hitler’s demands to takeover the Sudetenland land. Daladier abhorred the Munich agreements appeasement towards the Nazis, but Chamberlain was elated, and declared before a jubilant crowd in London that the Pact brought peace in our time. On 1st October, Germany annexed the Sudetenland and within six months nearly all of Czechoslovakia was under German control. In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and Britain and France declared war on Germany.

Posted by The Diamond Guru

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Saturday, September 27, 2008

Kimberley Process Under Threat Part 2 - Hezbollah in Venezuela


POLITICALLY INCORRECT (PART II)
- THE CASE OF VENEZUELA

Last week's column on the erosion of the effectiveness of the Kimberley Process (KP), on the organization's need to stop wasting time on trivial, technical infringements (caused by human error), and our call for the KP to start addressing the real macro-issues, generated an avalanche of responses.

A senior executive at a diamond jewelry retail chain, who holds an active leadership role in the industry, opined that: "consumers, in my experience, do not care if diamonds are smuggled.
They care about what the industry does to prevent diamonds from funding wars.

The Kimberley Process can still limit the second oldest profession in the world [smuggling] and there is nothing wrong in doing more to limit it, but like the oldest profession, it will never abolish it. The Kimberley Process is not a failure, but it could win more friends."

I have no problem with the first oldest profession in the world, but I don't like the implied view that if the consumer doesn't care about smuggling, we shouldn't either just because we can't stop it anyway.

Though smuggling is an infringement of industry's Best Practice Principles, I am the first to admit that these principles are hardly enforced.

However, smuggling is also a predicate money laundering offense. Those dealers trading in smuggled goods are guilty of a criminal offense in most of the world's jurisdictions.

So even if consumers "don't mind" smuggled goods (have they ever been asked?), as the jewelry chain spokesman suggests, we believe the trade shouldn't give it the ethical stamp of approval, accept it, or lend a hand to it.

There is one instance in which the KP is actually "promoting" or "condoning" smuggling - and that brings me to Venezuela, a subject on which most reactions to last week's column centered.
According to a U.S. State Department report, Venezuela is "one of the principal drug-transit countries in the Western Hemisphere...It refuses to cooperate with the United States on counternarcotics activities..." The country also suffers from "rampant corruption throughout the law enforcement, judicial, banking, and banking regulatory sectors." It's a major money-laundering country and known for its huge trade-based laundering.

Venezuela is currently not a "compliant" country on most of the regulatory issues of importance to the diamond trade.

In 2006, one of the conflict diamond NGOs, Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), issued an in-depth report about the illegal mining and smuggling in Venezuela and called for the country's expulsion from the KP.

Venezuela doesn't want that because its oil industry needs industrial diamonds to keep its wheels operating so that the oil will continue to flow out and the money will continue to flow in.
A politically weird game came into play. In order to avoid being kicked out of the KP, Venezuela "partly suspended" itself, making sure that it still gets all the benefits of a full "participant."

Only the United States has now prohibited all rough trade with Venezuela, something which is meaningless as trade will simply transfer through other countries.

Until recently, the United States apparently was quite "protective" of Venezuela.

Earlier this month (on September 8), the U.S. Federal Register published a notice effectively removing Venezuela from the list of KP countries.

The KP itself, however, has not yet removed that country, thus creating a strange situation.
Since 2005, no rough diamonds have officially been exported from Venezuela, for reasons best known to the Venezuelan authorities, but most likely because they had lost control of their largely artisanal diamond mining industry.

When pressed by the KP (or rather the NGOs involved in the KP), the country then decided to announce a halt to official exports, simply formalizing the de facto situation.

As Venezuela does have a considerable diamond production, employing tens of thousands of diggers, it is clear that diggers and miners had no legal way to export.

Officially condoned, supported and facilitated smuggling became the only available option.

No Functioning Kimberley Mechanism

Looking at the Kimberley data on the import side, the Venezuela KP authorities have never recorded any import of any rough diamonds - of either gem or industrial qualities.Never.
However, in fact, there were considerable industrial rough diamond imports from the United States into Venezuela in all of the past few years.

So from the beginning of the KP system, there has existed a ridiculous situation in which U.S. KP data shows exports to Venezuela, but the Venezuelan KP data doesn't show imports.

Over three years, the KP has never been able to get this issue resolved.

So Venezuela has the best of both worlds: it can smuggle rough gem diamonds to anywhere it wants while remaining a proper member of the Kimberley system for import purposes. With exception of the United States, this is still the law of the land.

If you have ever heard about having your cake and eating it too, Venezuela can become an example for any country in the world

And it's a daily reminder to all diamond traders and producing countries that the KP has ceased to take itself seriously.

This is a joke, and should almost be reason enough to close the KP system down.

You are allowed to smuggle rough but still can officially import rough from anywhere you want.In fact, the main exporter of rough diamonds to Venezuela was the United States.

Though acknowledging its recent "change of heart," it remains quite incomprehensible that the United States continued to send diamonds to Venezuela for years while the country itself was smuggling its own production to the rest of the world, including Europe.

Actually, in 2008, i.e. this year, in its first seven months, the U.S. government reports an increase of over 102.5 percent on the level of U.S. natural industrial diamond exports to the Venezuela. To be precise, these exports refer to Tariff Item 7101.21, which is a category requiring KP certificates.

The KP Walking Away from Hot Issues

The KP chair, the secretariat and the members actually walked away from their idiotic situation - preferring to argue about trivialities. Maybe this is because Venezuela has oil, and that makes all the difference.

I remember that in the early years of the conflict-diamonds issue, when an embargo was put on diamonds from Angola, U.S. Congressman Tony Hall, one of the early fighters against conflict diamonds, met with journalists at the U.S. embassy in London. I was there.

The question was raised why he went after diamond people and not the oil companies, which were thoroughly corrupting everyone in Angola and amounted to over 90 percent of that nation's exports.

The answer (and I don't remember the precise quote) was clear: the oil companies were all American and they were politically untouchable. Maybe nothing has changed.

At a recent KP session in New Delhi, participants walked away with different interpretations on what had been discussed. Intentional and planned ambiguity. Quite convenient - the participants avoided a political situation with an oil producer.

Until this very month, the United States had been stepping up the exports of industrial diamonds to Venezuela to serve its mining industry as if there were no KP. No, the KP is not a package containing specific obligations. What the KP is basically saying is that you can just take the part you like - and ignore the rest. It is both a disgrace and an outrage.

The KP authority in India, which chairs the KP this year, further accentuates the ambiguity by sending a circular to Indian exporters advising them that Venezuela "has voluntarily detached themselves from the KP Certification Scheme for a period of two years and ceases certification for exports of its diamonds. In view of this, no shipments of rough can be imported from Venezuela into India." Then it states that "Kimberley Process Certificates issued by Venezuela will not be accepted."

Wow! India will not accept certificates that nobody has seen for more than three years anyway. It's almost like saying that no $100 bills printed before 1900 will be used to buy diamonds.... So what's the purpose of that circular? As it was carefully crafted not to say a word about not sending rough to Venezuela, I guess that was the real message. Exports to Venezuela are allowed. With compliments from the Chair.

A Declaration of "KP Irrelevancy"?

It's time that the U.S. government explains how a trading partner that is clearly condoning the smuggling of its (and its neighbors') diamond production could still be seen as a legitimate export trade partner of the United States - until September 8, 2008.

There is no evidence of diamond exports to Venezuela from other countries after 2005, thus, therefore, the United States is the main "villain" of this story. But the KP is not the private domain of any one country. Europe, Russia, Israel, India and others are still condoning this weird status of Venezuela - which is formally still a KP member until this very day.

There is one KP law for Venezuela. There is apparently another one for the United States, and again, another one for the rest of the world. I am sure some western African nation would like to adopt the Venezuelan KP model. If the next KP Plenary Meeting fails to address this issue, it should adopt a motion declaring itself "Irrelevant." I wonder whether the adoption would be unanimous.
25 September 2008
CHAIM EVEN-ZOHAR
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Additional Reading:

Kimberley Process Under Threat Politically Incorrect Part 1
U.S. Lashes Back After Chavez Forces Envoy From Venezuela
Friday, September 12, 2008




Sierra Leone Sells First Gems



September 1, 2006 On the Venezuelan side of the Guajira Peninsula, a territory shared with Colombia, the members of the tribe of the Wayuu walk across political boundaries without restrain.
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They were there before Venezuela and Colombia existed and they think of themselves as a nation.
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Recently a disturbing group has appeared, as alien visitors, in their desert landscape: Hezbollah. The Islamic fanatics of Hezbollah are rapidly infiltrating the tribe of the Wayuu.
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They are indoctrinating the members of this tribe, to convert them into Islamic fanatics in charge of disseminating the terrorist message that has already created chaos, death and misery in the Middle East.
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The Hezbollah group invading Venezuela is doing its work openly in the Venezuelan side of the Guajira Peninsula.
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They are disseminating, via Internet, a strategy "to change Venezuela," including:
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Total destruction "of the sex industry" (whatever that means),
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Attacking the upper classes, "who are the most corrupt," all white collar criminals and continuing the cleaning downwards,
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Attacking corruption in government (not such a bad idea) and in the masses, both civilians and military,
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Attacking false idols and satanic cults, as defined by them.
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The logo adorning the main page and document is an AK-47 rifle.
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The propaganda appearing on the Web presence of the Venezuelan subsidiary of Hezbollah [hosted by Microsoft] talks about installing the kingdom of God in Venezuela by imposing a military-theocratic type of government, an explosive mixture similar to what already exists in Iran.
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It claims: "The brief enjoyment of life on earth is selfish.
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The other life is better for those who follow Allah." Where have we heard this before? In the leaflets that encourage the suicide missions of children and teenagers in Palestine.
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Is the Venezuelan Hezbollah for real or is just the product of pranksters with a macabre sense of humor?
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Available photographs suggest they are for real.
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This ghoulish presence in Venezuelan territory certainly deserves an immediate investigation and decisive action, if true, to eradicate such a horrible pest from our country.
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The problem is that Chávez is supporting Hezbollah in the Middle East and will most probably support their criminal work in Venezuela.
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Would the U.N. or the OAS take note?
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Venezuela is deteriorating to the point of no return.
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The social and political situation in Venezuela has reached the point in which major action will be required by civilized Venezuelans and their friends, if the country is to be saved from falling irreversibly into the hands of the fanatic and uncultured Chávez's gang.
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Those who are following the Venezuelan situation in detail can see clearly how Venezuelan society is dissolving, turning into a work of horror, something out of Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher or of H.P. Lovecraft's most morbid fiction.
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In the domestic scene Democracy and Human Rights have been roughly and impudently pushed aside, replaced by the abuses of a group of Neanderthal-like bureaucrats moved by social and racial hate.
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The Mayor of Caracas, a man by the name of Juan Barreto recently exploded out of control on TV, insulting his colleagues in a Stalinist-type of demonstration that left viewers horrified.
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A few days later this man went on to issue a decree "expropriating" the golf courses of the two main Caracas private clubs, in order "to build houses for the poor," as if these golf courses were the only available land left in the country for housing.
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These are just two examples of how the regime is behaving.
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The exercise of government, in Chávez's Venezuela, has been converted in a competition among gangsters, to see who are the most corrupt, the most uncivilized and the most destructive.
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While these gangsters roam at will in a country that has become a tropical version of Gotham City, Hugo Chávez is touring the world looking for allies in his quest to create an anti-U.S. coalition.
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President Bush has said that he "does not consider Chávez as a threat" ("Chávez's War of Words," By Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post, August 7, 2006).
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In this article Diehl reports in detail the attempts Chávez is making at creating the alliance but dismisses these attempts simply as a "war of words."
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I would not be so sure.
Chávez has been under estimated for some time now.
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He is generally perceived as an uncultured clown, as a person with unrealistic dreams of grandeur and as a wasteful political leader with an obsolete ideology.
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This is all true but Hugo Chávez is also a very dangerous man, with a big bag of money and a deep inferiority complex rooted in social and racial components.
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I think he is willing to do anything to leave an imprint in history, no matter what, how or when.
This is a scenario that has to be taken into account if very unpleasant surprises for the national security of the western hemisphere are to be avoided.
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Today, Hugo Chávez is openly siding with North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba, four rogue, terrorist states.
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By creating a Mission Manager post for Cuba and Venezuela, something only previously done for Iran and North Korea, the U.S. government is finally assigning the Castro-Chavez axis the priority it deserves.
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This is a move that has both flattered and worried Chávez. Therefore he has decided to accelerate his efforts to create a global coalition against the U.S.
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The three Chávez strategies
In order to do this he is conducting a three-pronged strategy:
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(1) , one, rather orthodox, which consists in buying weapons, some US$5 billion worth, from Russia, Spain and Belarus: multi-role fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships, assault rifles and more from Russia; corvettes and patrol boats from Spain; and Russian anti-aircraft missile sytems from Belarus in order to dissuade U.S. military action.
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(2) , an oil-oriented strategy, basically designed to threaten the U.S. with less petroleum supplies. He is selling CITGO's assets in the U.S. at low prices, in order to protect himself from the freezing of oil assets in the U.S.
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He is trying to enlist China as a replacement client for the U.S. by promising that country, quite unrealistically, 500,000 barrels of oil per day within the next five years.
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The Chinese know that this is an empty promise but they will try to get as much oil as they can out of Chávez, for as long as he lasts, while laughing secretly about his flamboyant behavior.
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As a follow up to this strategy he is also talking to Iran about pushing for higher prices within OPEC and encouraging, through promises of money, relatively minor international oil players like the dictator of Chad, the Bolivian president Evo Morales and the Ecuadorian government to become more aggressive against the mostly U.S. foreign multinationals.
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The visit of Chávez to Angola should be seen as an obvious move to attack U.S. vulnerability on oil imports.
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Angola produces over one million barrels of oil per day of excellent quality and almost 600,000 barrels per day are exported to the U.S.
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Any restrictions on this supply, if combined with restrictions of Venezuelan oil supplies, would have a dramatic impact on the U.S. economy, especially when reinforced by other actions such as the recent move against the U.S. petroleum companies by the dictator of Chad.
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The strategies mentioned above are, of course, very damaging to the Venezuelan people but, while particularly harmful to U.S. national interest, they do not pose an immediate large-scale threat of all-out violence in the hemisphere.
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(3) There is a third strategy being pursued by Chávez that could become the most dangerous in this respect.
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It has to do with the possible acquisition of weapons of mass destruction from North Korea and the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons from Iran and other weapons from Syria.
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Chávez or his deputies have visited Iran about half a dozen times during the last seven years.
He has explicitly formed a political alliance with Ahmadinejad. During his last visit he asked for G-d "to throw bolts at the monsters," ending this request by saying: "Inshallah," (ojalá in Spanish, G-d willing in English).
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Of course, in Chávez's mind these bolts would be missiles or, even worse, nuclear bombs.
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The National Council of Resistance of Iran has said that Iran will be able to start constructing nuclear bombs by next year, in installations located to the northeast of Teheran.
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A report by Rowan Scarborough in The Washington Times (August 31, 2006) says that the U.S. military estimates that an Iranian nuclear bomb is still five years away but, he adds, it would be dangerous to believe that there is plenty of time to act.
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In the case of Iraq, he says, it was found that the Hussein regime was much closer to producing nuclear weapons than the U.S. had estimated and the same could be true in the case of Iran.
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Nuclear weapons are essential for the consolidation of an Islamic empire, claims the National Council of Resistance of Iran, asking for immediate action against the regime of Ahmadinejad.
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Will Chávez replay the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960's?
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One thing has become evident: the Chávez regime is going to play an important role in the Iranian nuclear power play, probably similar to the role played by Castro during the Cuba missile crisis of the 1960's.
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Chávez's rhetoric is now one with his deeds.
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He probably estimates that there is no additional risk in coming out of the totalitarian closet and probably much to be gained in the hearts and minds of the Islamic world.
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This open posture of Chávez in alliance with the terrorist regimes of the world has been further confirmed by his visit to Syria, where he openly placed his regime firmly in alliance with the regime of Bashar al-Asad.
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In Syria he probably was briefed on the performance of the weapons given by the Syrians to Hezbollah in Lebanon, with a view to obtaining some of those weapons for the Venezuelan arsenal.
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The most effective weapons used by Hezbollah against the Israeli army were the RPG-29 Vampir with a tandem HEAT (high explosive anti-tank) warhead and, specially, the Kornet-E laser guided anti-tank missile (Kommersant, August 23, 2006 and The Washington Times, August 25, 2006, report by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough).
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Both of these weapons are Russian-made and were exported to Syria, eventually finding their way to Lebanon.
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Together with Iran, Syria has become the main supplier of weapons to Hezbollah.
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Recently the U.S. government froze the U.S. assets of two Syrian generals, Ikthiyar and Jama'a, due to their open support of the Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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If the Hezbollah are, as they seem to be, openly present in Venezuelan territory, the freezing of assets of Venezuelan bureaucrats by the U.S. might not be far behind.
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It is not difficult to see that, once the three strategies being developed by Chávez are put together, they constitute an increasingly dangerous threat to hemispheric and, even, world stability.
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Chavez will probably disappear "not with a bang but a whimper"
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If and when the U.S. moves militarily against the Iranian regime, a parallel move against Venezuela (and Cuba) would seem inevitable, as Chávez would immediately cut off petroleum supplies to the U.S.
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I have no doubt that Chávez is wishing for this to happen, as it constitutes his only chance to become a significant historical figure, one shrouded in martyrdom.
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Otherwise, his ineptness and buffoonery will condemn him to disappear in the manner predicted by T.S. Elliot for the end of the world: "Not with a bang but a whimper."
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The military said NATO fighters escorted the two Russian bombers on their way to Venezuela.The apparently retaliatory move follows the U.S. deployment of warships to deliver aid to the former Soviet nation of Georgia, barely a month after Russian armor and aircraft crushed the Georgian military in a five-day war.
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Diamond Imports
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Fair Trade Diamonds


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Today in History

1996 The Taliban seize control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul.

1988 Canadian Ben Johnson is officially stripped of his 100 metre gold medal at the Seoul Olympics after it is confirmed that his drug test proved positive.

1970 After 10 days of bitter fighting in
Jordan, King Hussein of Jordan and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,Yasser Arafat, sign a ceasefire agreement.

1968 In England, the controversial rock musical Hair, which included a scene cast in the nude, opens in London.

Posted by The Diamond Guru

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

IGI Launches Diamond-Typing Service

September 04, 2008 New York—
The International Gemological Institute (IGI) is offering a new service that can identify a diamond's type.
The service, known as IGI Diamond Typing and available via the New York laboratory, was developed in response to client demand and industry needs.
According to a release from the IGI, diamonds are one of four major types: Ia, Ib, IIa or IIb.Knowing a diamond's type is integral in determining the stone's color and can distinguish likely candidates for the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) color-treatment process and/or artificial irradiation.
If a diamond is determined fit for color treatment, knowing its type can help establish the proper treatment conditions (temperature, pressure, irradiation, etc.) and help to determine what color the diamond will be after treatment.
These diamond types are based on the concentration levels of nitrogen and/or boron in a given stone, as well as the state of aggregation of present nitrogen within its crystal lattice.
In addition, diamond typing plays a key role in distinguishing true "Canary" diamonds (type Ib) and true Golconda diamonds (type IIa).
"Diamond typing is a crucial first step in the color treatment of diamonds, and this new service can assist both our clients and the industry as a whole," IGI President and CEO Jerry Ehrenwald said in a media release.
Additional Reading:
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Diamond Imports

Posted by The Diamond Guru

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Diamond Fossicker Finds 4.68 ct Rough Diamond

Former Kearsley golf coach Richard Burke
discovers diamond in the rough
Burke poses with the diamond he found
at
Crater of Diamonds State Park.
Photos courtesy of Crater of Diamonds State Park
Former Kearsley golf coach Richard Burke
unearthed a 4.68-carat diamond while vacationing in Arkansas.

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GENESEE COUNTY, Michigan -- For Richard Burke, the phrase "finders keepers" never felt so good.The retired Kearsley golf coach was vacationing with his wife when, on a whim, they visited Arkansas' Crater of Diamonds State Park, where visitors pay $6.50 to search for diamonds.
Burke, 62, was digging in a shallow ravine Saturday when he unearthed a shiny rock.
Not wanting to announce his find just yet, he casually put it in his pocket and sauntered over to the ranger's station.Park officials examined the stone and confirmed what Burke had been hoping: He'd found a diamond -- a 4.68-carat white diamond, about the size of a peanut M&M.

"I just thought, 'Yes!'" he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing."When asked to name the diamond, Burke settled on "Sweet Caroline," after his wife, Carol.
It's sung by none other than Neil Diamond.Burke said he plans on having the stone appraised.
A diamond that size is "quite a find," said Catherine Rebeschke, manager of Medawar Jewelers in Flint Township. She guessed that a good-quality 4.68-carat diamond could be worth upwards of $38,000. Source :by Kristin Longley The Flint Journal
Saturday September 20
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Additional Reading :

Arkansas Diamond Scam March 17 FakeMinerals.com
There is only one active diamond mine in the United States - at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas. The mine yields a few hundred carats per year, mostly found by pay-to-dig visitors. A report at FakeMinerals.com says that a person has been sneaking look-alike diamonds from an Indian mine into the park and claiming that they were found there. The stones are then sold to people willing to pay high prices for stones that represent the Arkansas locality.
Glen Worthington : How to find diamonds in Arkansas DVD & Book details. Try not to take notice of the incredbly ugly jewellery.
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Monday, September 22, 2008

Gem stone discovered could be world's largest diamond

This diamond is almost 500 carats and may be worth more than
$21 million
It has the potential to yield one of the
largest flawless D color round polished diamonds in history
Miners in Lesotho have discovered a huge gem stone
which could become the largest polished round diamond in history
Photo: PA
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A huge gem stone which could become the largest polished round diamond in history has been discovered.
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The massive stone is the 20th largest rough diamond ever found, weighs 478 carats and is of outstanding clarity, said Gem Diamonds.

It was recovered at the Letseng Mine, owned by the company, in Lesotho earlier this week.
Another similar sized rough stone from the same mine was recently valued at 12 million US dollars.

But the clarity and round shape of this gem mean it could be worth considerably more and in its polished state could fetch tens of millions of pounds.

It is estimated to be capable of producing a 150 carat polished gem stone, dwarfing the Koh-i-Noor diamond which is part of the Crown Jewels.

A spokesman for Gem Diamonds added that initial examination suggested that the white diamond, which has yet to be named and valued, has a completely flawless centre.

The mine, which was owned by famous diamond company De Beers for many years, has already produced three of the world's biggest diamonds including the 603 carat Lesotho Promise, the 493 carat Leteng Legacy and the 601 carat Lesotho Brown.

Clifford Elphick, chief executive officer of Gem Diamonds, said "Preliminary examination of this remarkable diamond indicates that it will yield a record breaking polished stone of the very best colour and clarity."

The find is still dwarfed by the Cullinan Diamond which was discovered in 1905.

At 3,106 carats it was the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found but the biggest polished stone produced from it, the Great Star of Africa - 530 carats - is a teardrop shape.

The Koh-i-noor is a round cut but at 105 carats it is smaller than the potential size of the new find.

It originated in India but was seized by Britain as a spoil of war in 1849. It supposedly brings good luck to female owners and misfortune or death to any male who wears or owns it.
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Today in History 1980

Iran-Iraq War
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Long-standing border disputes and political turmoil in Iran prompt Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to launch an invasion of Iran’s oil-producing province of Khuzestan. After initial advances, the Iraqi offence was repulsed. In 1982, Iraq voluntarily withdrew and sought a peace agreement, but the Ayatollah Khomeini renewed fighting. Stalemates and the deaths of thousands of young Iranian conscripts in Iraq followed. Population centres in both countries were bombed, and Iraq employed the use of chemical weapons. In the Persian Gulf, a tanker war curtailed shipping and increased oil prices. In 1988, Iran agreed to a cease-fire.
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1955 Commercial television starts broadcasting in Britain for the first time.
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1862 Abraham Lincoln makes his initial emancipation proclamation, abolishing slavery and ordering that all slaves should be free from 1st January 1863.
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1792 French Revolution: The proclamation of France as a Republic.

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Sunday, September 21, 2008

Is Sin Harmless ?


September 07, 2008
The Economic Problem of Sin
By Bruce Walker
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Sin is an unpopular topic. In Hollywood today, unmarried pretty faces procreate and then splash baby pictures on the front of every women's magazine in America. No one dares question if the parents of this child have sinned, but, of course, they have. Indeed, they have sinned in several ways. They have conceived a child out of wedlock, which is a sin. They have also provided an example for millions of young women who lack the money to hire nannies and who imagine that their idols would not lead them into miserable lives. These unwed mothers, their children, and the unwed fathers too have rejected not just the rules of G-d, which -- amazingly! -- do not just deliver us from evil but also make our lives happier, healthier, and more successful.

Psychologists and other social experts take the sting out of sin. If sexually aroused young people make a child, this inconvenient debris can always be snuffed. If the pregnant mother chooses to have her baby, a host of government programs, from WIC to child support enforcement, will insure that the biological sperm donor is relegated to irrelevance in the life of the child. The idea that both parents have done something fundamentally wrong is as absent as the idea that people still sin. Even the word "sin" makes many of us uneasy. Who are we to say what is right and wrong? "We" are, indeed, nothing. Sin is a principle of G-d, not men.

But put faith aside for a moment. Take G-d out of the picture. What are the consequences of a child growing up with only one parent, a mother, who is dependent upon government largess and coercive child support programs to survive? Poverty, for one thing, is much more likely in this fatherless home. The child is more likely to grow up contemptuous of work and of school. He is more likely to be crippled by drugs, alcohol, depression, and delinquency. Rather than taking care of society, as we have expected new generations to do, this child is much more likely to need society to take care of him.

More and more people and politicians have come to couch every issue into economic terms. This is a flawed viewpoint, but say we accept the premise anyway. What is the biggest economic problem in America today? It is simply sin. Everyone now agrees that the best way to a productive society is to have people emotionally well-adjusted, physically healthy, well educated, temperate drinkers, good and interested parents, strategic financially (e.g. people who save rather than always spend), and who provide for family members and others a private social safety net.

A society that condemns sin and urges people to reject sin produces just that sort of people. Couples marry before they have children; they raise children in a two family home; they work, stay sober, care for family members and members of their church or synagogue, draw happiness and confidence from religious faith, plan ahead, study (how quickly we forget, in our infatuation with public education, that the idea of literacy was uniquely religious in origin - Jewish boys and Scottish girls and boys were the first children compelled to become literate, and the reasons had entirely to do with religious injunctions. Sins of omission and sins of commission bring us into a society which must be supported by props of massive social programs, huge public relations campaigns, and an enormous amount of our energy. And all this does not work. Pseudo-morality simply makes us feel better for awhile. When people begin to believe that sin is a myth, then they lose all immunity to the soul disease which will slowly kill them.

Because our Leftist overlords of education and culture have scolded us for thinking sin is real, we become ashamed of wanting to minimize sin in our society. What Bill Clinton did, for example, was despicable, but what was the response from the bosses of establishment punditry? "Everyone lies..." was bad enough, but they had to push the envelope against any idea of sin "...and often lying is therapeutic." Lying to Nazis about D-Day may be good, but making mendacity chic unleashes the monsters of our lusts. And even for people who are not particularly religious, the economic costs of pandemic dishonesty are almost incalculable.

What is wealth today? Isn't wealth really information? What about information makes it valuable? Truth gives information value - false information is like vicious gossip or counterfeit currency: it causes economic chaos rather than creates real wealth. How we each treat information gives that information its vast economic value. Honor and honesty create wealth. Consider Orthodox Jewish diamond cutters. Historically, when they meet and examine individual diamonds, a cutter can take a diamond home to examine it and bring the same diamond back. They honor the commandment not to steal, because that is a sin. What is the practical economic consequence? The efficiency of diamond trading and diamond cutting is dramatically more productive than if a host of high tech security systems, passwords, polygraph tests and so forth were required for business.

What would happen if we all believed that stealing and that lying were sins and if we then behaved as if those sins would be punished by G-d? Remove the danger of massive theft and lying from our economy, and we can dispense with a whole host of baggage that drags down the usefulness of cyberspace. How much software is intended just to protect us from viruses, identity theft, and related moral crimes? How much do corporations waste on this? The wages of sin are very expensive to us.

What would happen if poor people rejected the sin of envy, which is the seed of socialism, and did not rage against those who had more then them? G-d forbids this rage, but it is nursed and treated as if it was not a sin but a virtue. What would happen if, along with the people rejecting envy, the wealthy rejected the sin of miserliness and embraced serious charity? G-d insists that we help those with less, but when men doubt sin is real then that divine order loses power. If we listened seriously to G-d - all of us - then the "problem" of inequality of wealth would go away as much as it can in a world of mortal men. We would not have Heaven - we cannot have Heaven here - but we would have a much better world. The economy would boom because the help that the rich gave the poor would be targeted and intended to really end poverty (the fewer the poor, the more the religious rich can keep - an angle the atheist Marx never quite got.)

If sin messes up our economy so much and if the economy is the political issue that drives polls and elections, why are candidates not calling for people to stop sinning and why do candidates not condemn sin in our society? That would not be chic at all, and above all, politicians want to be liked by those who make our entertainment, report the news, and otherwise define what is cool in our lives. These molders of modern thought see a post-sin world. In the place of sin they have snickers, shock, and sensationalism or they have hordes of experts - demigods of various stripes - who tell us what is, today, moral or immoral. They are priests without a deity, and their temples bulge with all types of treasure which we have given them (or, rather, they have taken from us) - influence, attention, celebrities, amusement, "education" (or rather "re-education"), and social values. This treasure is spent lavishly to punish the position that sin is genuine and that it causes misery.

Yet the cool, practical, financial argument against sin is so overwhelming, the number crunching of any serious cost-benefit analysis of the trillions lost through our acceptance of sin is so convincing, that hopeful people can dream that a wise leader will champion the fight against sin as the clearest way to make us wealthier and happier people. That assumes, of course, that our leaders have guts. It assumes as well that big chunks of influential powerbrokers among the establishment do not have a private and profound interest in the rest of us seeing sin as harmless.

Many people, me included, worry about our loss of freedoms. We fret about the size of government. We look at the Leftist establishment and wonder how we can survive. Somewhere in our maze of doubts and fears, we have forgotten that sin is not a joke of G-d. Sin is not some topic for religious fanatics or end-of-the-world kooks. We cannot make sin into goodness any more than we can make life immortal or otherwise make our mortal selves into little gods and goddesses. Whatever paper rights we have, whatever institutions of liberty we enshrined, all will wilt and spoil unless we, the people, believe in sin and fight it in our lives. Our leaders can do nothing unless they, too, begin with the First Principle of social living: sin is real and sin is wrong.

Human liberty is constructed around the ancient ideas of Christians and of Jews. These ideas embraced many things, but central in our living together as people and being successful is seeing sin as slavery and grasping that fighting sin is the beginning of freedom. This freedom, we all know, makes us prosperous, but this freedom itself cannot survive unless we see well the problem of sin. Just as freedom is a delightful spin-off of fighting sin, prosperity is a delightful spin-off of freedom as well as righteous living. All of our problems today - especially and emphatically, our economic problems - are simply problems of sin. If we want to fight poverty and create affluence, begin by making common cause to attack those things which we know, in our hearts, are sinful. Corny and old-fashioned? Truth almost always is.

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Our Talmudic sages tell us that in all of our dealings we are forbidden from deceiving others, leading them to believe they obtain a benefit from someone beyond the person's actual effort. Such deception is called geneivat data, literally "stealing judgment".

When people are improperly informed, their judgment is not exercised freely.

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Ponahalo Diamonds

The Ponahalo diamonds were cut from a 316-carat stone and
weigh approximately 102 and 70 carats each.
Photo courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. 2008.
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Two polished diamonds cut from the 316.15 carat 'Ponahalo' diamond will be the highlights of Christie's October auction, National Jeweler reported.Christie's 'Jewels: The New York Sale' is scheduled for Oct. 15 in New York and features diamonds of 102.11 carats and 70.87 carats, both cut from the Ponahalo diamond.

The Ponahalo diamond came out of De Beers' Venetian mine in 2005, and is the largest stone ever to emerge from that diamond mine, the report said.

Jonathan Oppenheimer of De Beers named the diamond: Ponahalo means "vision" in Sotho, the tribal language spoken by the Venda tribe in the area of South Africa where the stone was mined.

The Steinmetz Diamond Group cut the Ponahalo into four polished diamonds and left one in rough form. The two rectangular-cut diamonds to be offered at the Christie's auction are the largest of the four and took 18 months to craft.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the Ponahalo diamonds will be donated to Russell Simmons' Diamond Empowerment Fund, a nonprofit organization that funds educational programs in Africa where diamonds are a natural resource.

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Auscert Difference NOT endorsed by Diamond Imports

AUSCERT
A member of the Jewellers Association of Australia
A member of the Diamond Dealers Club of Australia
SHAME SHAME SHAME
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Diamond Imports, one of Australia's leading diamond wholesalers refuses to endorse Auscert.


The following has been circumcised for comment by Daniel F Katz GG from the above link:

1) “ Auscert is completely independent. We do not sell diamonds, nor are we affiliated with any manufacturers of diamonds.” FALSE

The co- owner of Auscert owns a jewellery shop based in Melbourne. His name is Mr Anthony Bates, qualifications unknown.
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In the past Mr Bates has endorsed his Auscert pseudo diamond certificates in his own jewellery store and website called Tiche while falsely claiming Auscert's independence.
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He has since joined the Diamond Dealers Club of Australia once again seeking credibility for himself.
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The Diamond Dealers Club of Australia (DDCA) " provides an environment for the trading of diamonds, within a set of trading practices. DDCA has a legal, Ethical framework to enact regulations for members and protect consumer confidence."
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Since Mr Bates is in clear breach of the DDCA guidelines he should be expelled immediately or the DDCA risk's it's reputation while still in it's embryonic state.
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"Simply, we are not a CIBJO approved Laboratory, thus we can do whatever we want. We are not answerable or legally bound to any of their codes of ethics or rulings from the blue book" : Anthony Bates of Auscert
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"To be honest, the last diamond I sold through my design studio was a DCLA certified stone and it was bloody nice, correctly graded and the client loved it!" : Anthony Bates of the non compliant pseudo diamond lab Auscert commenting on the only compliant recognised diamond grading laboratory in Australia, the Diamond Certification Laboratory of Australia .

Mr Bates while claiming to be an independent diamond grader is a jeweller and diamond vendor.

The other owner Ms Monica Crofts sells coloured gemstones and values jewellery. Diamond labs do not value.

The world jewellery and diamond governing bodies such as CIBJO and the WFDB do not permit jewellery or diamond dealer members to have cross ownership or interests in laboratories

2) “If you have a problem or even a question with an overseas certificate, where and to whom would you contact? “

Correct Answer:
The Diamond Certification Laboratory of Australia , the only independent accredited diamond grading laboratory in Australia recognized by the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB) and The World Jewellery Confederation (CIBJO ).

In addition DCLA is one of only five International Diamond Council diamond grading labs in the world.

3) “With Auscert you have the comfort and assurance that we are right here on your doorstep “
Thankfully Diamond Imports is based in Sydney and Auscert is in Melbourne.

There are diamond vendors who use Auscert and display the Auscert logo on their websites.

In Australia we seriously advise prior to purchase of a diamond always verify the accuracy of the diamond grade with the DCLA.

Diamond Imports refuses to endorse Auscert until they comply with a standard we feel meets the criteria of an internationally recognized diamond grading laboratory.

4) “3 Facts That Make Auscert Unique

i) We are the only lab that does NOT certify poorly cut diamonds FALSE

ii) We have the world's strictest grading parameters FALSE

iii) We are the only lab that openly advertises it's proportions “ FALSE

5) “So what does all this mean? It means you can have full faith in an Auscert certified diamond, and you can compare apples with apples knowing our grading system. No other certification labs that we know of are doing this. “ FALSE...oops sorry it is half true and I agree. I do not know any other certification lab doing this. No other diamond certification lab compares apples. Most usually compare diamonds with diamonds. This begs the question what kind of laboratory standard equipment does Mr Bates actually utilise? Fortunately I used to work in an apple packing house in my 20's therefore I am qualified to write on this subject too. There was a standardised size card we used to grade different apples diameters with simply by seeing if they fit through the matching size hole. It was an exacting task that required great skill until one day I threw an apple at someone's head and was demoted immediately to the box assembly unit where I met Don Pablo from Argentinia. He was 80 and I was 20. " Yallah yallah Don Pablo ! " was the catch cry of the day drowned out by the thunder of badly aimed Hezbollah rocket launchers that fortunately for me but not for Mr Bates managed to miss me everytime...but I digress~~~~this has nothing to do with apples unless of course the expression " the apple of your mother's eye " had some subliminal connection to a previously unidentified and undetected Oedipus complex which could explain everything about why " you can compare apples with apples " with the Auscert grading system boasting it has " the world's strictest grading parameters " Vas es doos schmeer putz? In the meantime be on the look out for laser drilling worms and barking mad apple grubs that may answer to the name of Anthony. They are a menace in any diamond certification laboratory I am told by experts in Melbourne. ( Next week we will have a special on first season grapes and prunes and we will chuck in a free mango with every purchase of 101 apple graded diamond Auscerts as a token of our gratitude. The winner of our annual free brick diamond tester will also be announced providing I can smuggle it out of mein bunker undetected shhhhh....stay calm. It's not over yet.) Halleluyah for full faith ! Is Sin Harmless ?

Diamond Imports have full faith in comparing diamonds with diamonds NOT apples with apples. We sell diamonds. We are not a fruit shop. Full faith is a very bold statement.If I have missed the messiah yet again please contact Pope Benedict XVI. It's his job not mine.Apples schnapples... that bloody tree of knowledge was trouble since the first day.

6) “Every stone is then graded for Colour against our Diamond colour masters stones and using a Colourimeter.” UNCONFIRMED MASTER SET

The confirmation of registered master stones used by Auscert has never been confirmed or published to best of our knowledge despite numerous requests by us and the Jewellers Association of Australia.

If the situation has changed we have not been informed. And who cares anyway ? We refuse to use second class diamond grading certificates for our high quality certified diamonds.

Colourimeters are a convenient indicator but are NOT accurate. The colour grade of a diamond can be effected by fluorescence, inclusions, the make and the hue of the diamond if it has brown or grey overtones.

All respected diamond grading laboratories worldwide still colour grade diamonds with their own eyes using a registered diamond colour master set for colour comparisons.

The difference in colours or lack of colour can translate into thousands of dollars.

Mr Bates unsolicited and annoying telephone calls have been refused.

However if he wishes to respond he may do so the same way he did when he last wrote to me with his threats of hollow retribution.

I need to be amused in between diamond sales.

The Diamond Guru

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Kimberley Process Threatened by Russia. Is it failing ?


Russia Arms Exporter to Accept Diamonds,

Commodities for Payment

BBC: Russia is ready to sell arms to Africa for diamonds and other natural resources. Rosoboronexport [Russian state-controlled arms exporter] is willing to offer potential clients among countries on the African continent alternative schemes of settlement for the supply of military equipment, Anatoliy Isaykin, director-general of the state enterprise, told reporters today.

"Rosoboronexport is willing to use alternative and flexible settlement schemes. These include creation of joint ventures and exploration of underground mineral resources. These offers made by the Russian side give African countries more opportunities to obtain the latest Russian weapons," Isaykin said.

A spokesman for the Rosoboronexport press service has explained to RIA Novosti that the enterprise was willing to receive traditional African export commodities, including diamonds, timber, cotton, palm oil and coffee, as payment for armaments.

"Acquisition and use of quotas for the exploitation of mineral resources and marine products, and establishment of joint ventures in fishing, in the mining and oil industries and in mine clearing is not ruled out either," the press service spokesman said.

[A later RIA Novosti report, quoted Isaykin as saying that Rosoboronexport regarded as a priority the creation in Africa of service centres to repair Russian helicopters and MiG-23, MiG-27, MiG-29 and Su-24 aircraft supplied to African countries earlier, and to train their pilots. A Rosoboronexport spokesman was quoted as saying the company was also offering various upgrades for helicopter purchased by African states.]

Another RIA Novosti report, quoted Isaykin as saying that Rosoboronexport would meet and possibly even overshoot its target of $6.112 billion in arms sales revenues in 2008.
Copyright © 2008 BBC Monitoring Service

Additional Reading:

Sierra Leone Sells First Gems

RUSSIAN BEAR IN THE JUNGLE

Russian Expansion in Africa Continues
Russian Beneficiation
Russian Expansion in Africa Continues
Russia Reduces Auctions of Special Diamonds, Lifts Sight Values
Alrosa chief says weak dollar will force diamond industry to act
The Three Industry Wild Cards
Africa: The Bear And the Dragon
The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming
Vybornov: Demand is Growing and the Supply is a “Bit Stuck” Versus Siberian Diamonds Limited
Historical Feature:The Lev Leviev Group Takes on De Beers
Natalia Sarsadskikh - Indicator Trailblazer at Yakut - World's Largest Diamond Mine Part 2 Mirny Siberia
World's Largest Diamond Mine
Russian Update
From Russia With Love

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Kimberley Process Under Threat

Rosoboronexport
Politically Incorrect

Something axiomatic in our industry: you don’t publicly talk about matters that might affect consumer confidence. It is politically incorrect to even remotely disturb what De Beers’ Gareth Penny likes to call “The Diamond Dream.” It is also politically incorrect to talk about kickbacks, bribes and corruption related to diamonds traded in producer countries and elsewhere. This attitude has stifled the debate within the industry on vital issues that impact our daily lives. TheKimberley Process is one of those issues. The KP has become a club of foreign ministry officials of some 74 countries holding plenary meetings, committee meetings, peer reviews, etc., and they probably make a significant contribution to airline and tourist industries.
With all the discussions, it is politically incorrect to question the integrity of the government bodies that are issuing the KP certificates, unless blatant violations are reported by an NGO. The KP is foremost a political arrangement and, in various instances, driven by political considerations. Actually, a Belgian academic earned a doctorate by doing a dissertation on the politics within the KP.
From an industry perspective, what we have today is a very inflexible system, which arguably has outlived its time and is something that ought to be discussed by industry. The KP’s official “raison d’etre” is the avoidance of future conflict. This has become a questionable argument.
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Surat Sustained by Zimbabwe Goods
The effectiveness of the KP is gradually being eroded. Millions of carats from Zimbabwe find their way to Surat in India, partly through intermediate centers where for 3 percent a KP certificate can be obtained. The smuggled goods -in the $6-$10 range- are so cheap that it has actually caused a decline of the market price of the brown colored and cape goods. Lebanese traders, operating along the Mozambique borders, will “house deliver” rough anywhere – without ever meeting a KP official. There are many more stories like this. But the KP management is occupied by “more serious” issues
When a London rough distributor sends rough to Hungary, there is no need for a KP certificate; but when the same supplier sends a similar parcel to Israel, a certificate is needed. And when the world is busy issuing some 60,000 certificates every year, mistakes happen. Wow! London has sent a $150,000 parcel to Tel Aviv and simply forgot to add the certificate. This has already become the subject of endless meetings, discussions, debates, e-mails and what not.
In the meantime, the goods have been confiscated in Tel Aviv because Tel Aviv cannot send them back to London without a certificate. And if Tel Aviv would send the parcel to London, the KP authority there would confiscate it because it has no certificate. This is ridiculous, and there are quite a few examples of such mistakes that occupy time and attention of all those traveling KP representatives. There is no solution in sight. The Israeli customs also cannot “sell” the confiscated goods because, by definition, these are now conflict diamonds.
The KP’s inflexibility of dealing with human error problems has led to what I would call an “underground problem-solving system” in which the diamond players themselves make the necessary arrangements to solve accidents. When the KP cannot provide remedies, the market will. This costs money and undermines the integrity of the system, but the diamantaires won’t lose their diamonds. Sometimes we tend to forget what this is all about. There is no way in the world that a parcel from England would, in any way, shape or form, be considered conflict diamonds. The parcel becomes “conflict” just because of an administrative oversight.
The reason I’m writing this is because I’ve been wondering for quite a while how a country like Venezuela, which produces a small but fair amount of diamonds and which also has a porous border absorbing smuggled goods from Brazil and Guyana, has voluntarily withdrawn from the KP. How does Venezuela market its rough diamonds?
I don’t have the answer yet, but by trying to look at the options open to a country like Venezuela I came across huge arms purchases from the Russian state-controlled arms-trading monopoly Rosoboronexport to Venezuela. The country’s president, Hugo Chavez, has in recent years purchased dozens of Sukhoi fighter jets, military helicopters, Kalashnikov assault rifles and other weaponry for an estimated cost of $3 billion. Last year, Rosoboronexport traded worldwide arms in excess of $20 billion. It is an interesting company – with a link to diamonds. It’s that link that should bother us a lot.
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Sergei Chemezov, Head of Rosoboronexport,

has been appointed Rostechnologii Director General

Weapons for Diamonds

Rosoboronexport is the sole intermediary agency for the export and import of all military products, technologies and services in Russia. The company accounts for more than 90 percent of Russia’s annual arms sales and has been cooperating with more than 60 countries during its 50-year history, most of it as an instrument of the Soviet Union. The company appeared in the news this week because its director general, Anatoliy Isaykin, had told BBC that it is “offering potential clients from countries on the African continent alternative schemes of settlement (barter) for the supply of military equipment.”
There is nothing new about this. The company has always had a policy of accepting products such as rough diamonds in payment for arms. It is also willing to accept mineral rights and to get involved in mining. What is amazing about it is that Rosoboronexport actually promotes itself in Africa as providing a flexible payment solution to governments. The arms supplier says:
"The corporation is ready to embrace alternative and flexible approaches to settlements. For instance, one of the options may consist in payments by counter deliveries of traditional African export products, such as diamonds, timber, cotton, palm oil, and coffee. Another option may envision quotas on developing natural resources and seafood: establishment of joint ventures in fishing, mineral resource and oil industries; mine-clearing operations.”
Who are its main clients?
“Rosoboronexport has significantly stepped up cooperation with such traditional importers of Russian weapons as Algeria, Libya, Angola, Ethiopia and Uganda. Certain progress has been made in relations with Morocco, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and Burkina Faso. We offer competitive Russian arms and material delivery, repair, overhaul, and modernization projects to our African partners,” says Sergei Svechinikov, the head of a delegation currently exhibiting at an international arms show in Cape Town
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Company on the U.S. Sanctions List
Aside from Rosoboronexport’s involvement with African countries, including the main diamond producers, the company also appears on the United States sanctions list because of its violation of the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000, a U.S. law aimed at preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction to Tehran.
This company is offering weapons for diamonds and presumably these diamonds will end up somewhere in Russia. Maybe in the Gokhran, we don’t know. We have no evidence that the company is doing it right at this moment and we want to make that very clear. However, we have plenty of evidence that such transactions have taken place in the past - Courier companies remember that, in the pre-KP days, rough from Africa was occasionally shipped via Moscow to Antwerp. What should concern us is that a country that only last year was heading the KP would officially promote weapons-for-diamonds deals involving a Russian state monopoly that is also on the U.S. sanctions list. So much for the earlier mentioned argument that we still need the KP because it will prevent tomorrow’s conflicts.
Even if, theoretically, one could follow the trail of “bartered diamonds,” something that is probably unlikely, one still might advance that there is nothing illegal per se about this. But I really had thought that the whole concept of “weapons for diamonds” would by now not be condoned by the industry, even for no other reasons than preserving consumer confidence. Retailers, such as Wal-Mart, want to show the “value pipeline” of their jewelry. Rosoboronexport may not fill the desired profile. But this goes far beyond Kimberley. Dealing with a diamond supplier that is on the U.S. sanctions list is also an anti-money laundering offense prohibited in all the diamond centers.
What I’m trying to say is rather than having endless discussions about a missing certificate on a $150,000 shipment from London to Tel Aviv, it would be far more productive if the politicians running the KP would devote some of their enormous energy to explore weapons-for-diamonds deals by their main participants. Even if there is no concrete deal to point at, the very fact that the company is publicly promoting such deals should be enough to convey to Rosoboronexport that their bartered diamonds might be tainted. This suggestion may not be “politically correct”– so don’t hold your breath. The KP tries to reach political consensus on the issues they raise. However, if the KP fails to do so, we, as an industry, should consider what we can do ourselves.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH, 2008, CHAIM EVEN-ZOHAR
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The Auscert Difference NOT endorsed by Diamond Imports Part 2

http://www.yellowpages.com.au/bi/auscert-melbourne-vic-4563104.html

+ added 20th September [ In a short email from Ian Hadassin, the CEO of the Jewellers Association of Australia, I was forwarded an explanation by Mr Anthony Bates of Auscert that the category of Diamond Merchant under which Auscert appears will be removed within 48 hours from the Yellow Pages online advertisement.

After we managed to decipher and interpret the numerous spelling mistakes, ( spellcheck is a difficult medium to master it seems) ,Mr Bates explained that this was done in error by Yellow Pages.

If this was an error why did it take this story to prompt Mr Bates to have it now removed ?

According to Mr Bates who claims he was unaware of the error, I found it amazing how Yellow Pages' mind readers took the initiative and assumed the name Auscert should automatically appear under the Diamond Merchants category rather than the normal Jeweller's Services category without Mr Bates' assistance or instructions for an advertisement he was paying for.

In any case I have been delighted to know that The Diamond Guru has been of constructive assistance in assisting Mr Bates with this oversight for which there is no need to thank me.

Obviously Mr Bates has too much on his mind in between selling diamonds and certifying diamonds that I am sure his work load is enormous. ]

According to Anthony Bates of Auscert, he does not sell diamonds.

The Auscert website states:

“ Auscert is completely independent. We do not sell diamonds, nor are we affiliated with any manufacturers of diamonds.”

How does Mr Bates therefore explain his yellow pages listing?

Auscert is clearly listed as a diamond merchant

Mr Bates is both a member of the Jewellers Association of Australia and the Diamond Dealers Club of Australia.

The credibility Mr Bates seeks is sacrificing the integrity of these organisations and jeopardising consumer confidence.

How long will it take for the JAA and the DDCA to act before they themselves lose any credibility?

Those diamond vendors who continue to hide behind pseudo diamond grading reports are liable.

Mr Bates it's time you decide who you are ; grader or trader ?

One head, one hat.

It is ironic that all those who jumped on the band wagon rubbishing the genuinely independent DCLA by falsely accusing them of trading in diamonds were and are still retaining the services of Mr Bates' unrecognised unaccredited pseudo diamond TRADING laboratory.

If you see the Auscert logo on a diamond vendors website please ask how they justify selling their diamonds with an Auscert diamond certificate?

Falsely claiming independence when not practising it can hardly be regarded as ethical or moral.

Mr Bates is clearly a self-professed diamond grader qualifications unknown and a diamond trader.

It is a complete conflict of interest and those diamond vendors advertising the Auscert logo on their websites are also guilty by association.

These same diamond vendors are failing in their duty of care to their clients by deceptively marketing diamonds that are NOT independently graded as stated.

Hope this helps,

Daniel F Katz GG

The Auscert Difference NOT endorsed by Diamond Imports Part 1

Diamonds: Undercutting Prices & Deceptive Websites

Pick the Problem in Melbourne


Why Jewellery Stores Dislike Knowledgeable Customers


Why is it unethical for a jeweller or a diamond dealer to certify their own diamonds?


Inaccurate Diamond Grading Certificates

Latest Amendments Below

Non Compliant Diamond Grading Laboratories

***

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Damien Hirst Artist Record Breaker

British artist Damien Hirst poses with a diamond-encrusted platinum skull.
Photo: Reuters

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Hirst hits back at Aussie critic
September 9, 2008

British artist Damien Hirst has hit back at condemnation from Australian art critic Robert Hughes by likening his business approach to that of greats Rembrandt, Velasquez and Goya.

Speaking yesterday at auction house Sotheby's, which will offer 223 new works by the artist for sale next week, Hirst defended himself against Hughes' criticism that he was "functioning like a commercial brand".

"Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, I think they were all thinking about the commercial aspects of art," Hirst said.

"I believe I'm only doing what any of these artists would be doing if they were alive."

But Hirst also said he put art first and money was secondary.

Hughes has branded Hirst's works - which include a diamond encrusted human skull which recently sold for £50 million ($108.4 million) - as "tacky" and "absurd" in a new TV documentary in Britain.

The Australian described Hirst's acclaimed shark in formaldehyde is the "world's most over-rated marine organism" despite it having sold for £8 million ($17.34 million) four years ago.

"It is a clever piece of marketing but as a piece of art it is absurd," Hughes says in the documentary, The Mona Lisa Curse, which is to be screened on Channel 4 on September 21.

But Hirst dismissed the criticism as "Luddite".

"I wouldn't expect anything less from Robert Hughes," Hirst said.

"He probably cried when Queen Victoria died."

The Sotheby's auction, which expected to raise £65 million ($140.35 million), is seen as a ground-breaking departure from the tradition of leading artists selling works through galleries and dealers.
AAP

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Artist Damien Hirst's London sale breaks records
September 16, 2008

File photo dated Sept . 8 2008 of The Golden Calf, a work by Damien Hirst . An embalmed calf with hooves and horns of 18-carat gold titled "The Golden Calf" sold for 10.3 million pounds (US$18.5 million) at Sotheby's auction house Monday Sept. 15 2008. Monday's sale kicked off a two-day auction of the artist's work that is expected to generate more than 65 million pounds (US$116 million). Sotheby's said it expects the sale to set a new record for an auction of works by just one artist. (AP Photo / Fiona Hanson)

***

LONDON (Reuters) - Damien Hirst smashed the record for an auction dedicated to a single artist, selling 54 new works on Monday for 70.55 million pounds ($127 million) in a sale that underlined the resilience of the high-end art market.

The British artist's "The Golden Calf", a bull in a tank of formaldehyde with its head crowned by a gold disc, sold for 10.35 million pounds, a record at auction for one of the contemporary art world's most bankable stars, Sotheby's said.

The Hirst auction came after Sotheby's and Christie's, the world's top auction houses, raised more than $1 billion in London art sales this summer -- and was held the same day the fourth largest U.S. investment bank collapsed.

Auction houses have been appealing to "recession-proof" buyers in the Middle East and Russia , where record oil prices have boosted already massive fortunes, along with the super-rich in emerging economies such as India.

"I think the market is bigger than anyone knows. I love art and this proves I'm not alone, and the future looks great for everyone!" said Hirst.

The 43-year-old artist stunned the art world when he said 223 new works would be auctioned by Sotheby's in the first mass sale of its kind by a major artist.

By taking them straight to an auction house, Hirst is cutting out the art galleries that he says take an "extortionate" amount of the proceeds, or up to 50 percent.

Works on offer in the two-day sale, called "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", were created over the past two years.

The 70.55 million pound total for Monday evening surpassed the high estimate of 62.3 million pounds and the previous record for an auction by a single artist -- $32 million raised in 1993 at the sale of 88 paintings by Picasso.

TIGER SHARK
Works sold on Monday included Hirst's trademark animals in formaldehyde -- a shark, the bull, a sheep -- along with butterfly, spin and spot paintings. Another 167 new pieces will be auctioned on Tuesday.

Sotheby's said it took 14 works to India for Hirst's first exhibition there, while some 21,000 people visited the 11-day preview in London -- the auction house's most well-attended pre-sale exhibition in the British capital.

"The Kingdom", a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde -- a smaller version of "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- fetched 9.56 million pounds, way above the estimate of 4-6 million pounds.

"Fragments of Paradise", made of stainless steel and glass with manufactured diamonds, sold for 5.19 million pounds, exceeding its guide price of 1-1.5 million pounds. "Afterlife", a butterfly painting, went for 1.39 million pounds, double the 500,000-700,000 pound estimate.

Hirst's previous record at auction for a single piece was his medicine cabinet, "Lullaby Spring", which sold for 9.65 million pounds in 2007.

He has been unapologetic about mixing creativity with cash despite accusations he is producing only for profit. One commentator referred to the auction as a "clearance" sale.

He has argued that if the sale raises tens of millions of pounds, at a time when the art market is booming despite economic gloom elsewhere, it may attract more people to art.

Hirst has come under fire from some top critics, including Australia's Robert Hughes, who has called his art "tacky" and "absurd".

The sale coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Freeze exhibition in London which launched the careers of Hirst and some of his fellow "Young British Artists".
(Editing by Catherine Evans)

Additional Reading:

Diamond Skull

Hirst's super-rich fans confound critics and snap up his sharks, calves and stardust

In pictures: The works on sale

Diamonds For Art Lovers

Rare Blue Diamond Breaks Auction Record

Inflation & Weakened US Dollar Affects Diamond Prices

Investing in Diamonds: The Terms of Engagement

DIAMONDS: DIMINISHING SUPPLY

De Beers Goes into the Lab Business with Forevermark Part 4 : The Forevermark Brand Strategy Empowering the Retailers

The Three Industry Wild Cards

Risky Business

Alrosa chief says weak dollar will force diamond industry to act

Diamonds-The Universal Gem & Portability of Wealth

Historical Feature: The Diamond Boom of the 70's

Inflation & Weakened US Dollar Affects Diamond Prices

Investing in Diamonds: The Terms of Engagement An excellent insight

Diamond Circle Capital : Can commoditisation be good for diamond prices?

Long-term outlook for diamond jewellery positive – analyst

Huge Price Increases in Diamond Prices Boom Times Ahead

***

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RUSSIAN BEAR IN THE JUNGLE


Alrosa agrees with DRC on Sengamines takeover

Mining entrepreneur Mike Nunn says First African Diamonds, a company he owns, was illegally expropriated, and that he is taking the DRC government to arbitration in Geneva.

Author: John Helmer Posted: Tuesday , 16 Sep 2008 Moscow -

President Joseph Kabila's review and reorganization of controversial diamond-mining licences and concessions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) apparently took a new direction this past week, with approval of a Russian proposal to develop the Sengamines project. Until April of this year, this has been under the control of South African mining entrepreneur Mike Nunn and First African Diamonds Ltd. (FAD), a company he owns.

Nunn has told Mineweb that FAD was illegally expropriated, and he is taking the DRC government to arbitration in Geneva.

Alrosa says that it has agreed to start diamond prospecting in the DRC, at Kabila's request. But Alrosa sources say that details of the undertaking, and of a meeting Alrosa chief executive Sergei Vybornov had last week with Kabila, should be kept secret. It is Vybornov's second meeting with Kabila this year; the first occurred, with comparably little disclosure, in March.

According to a new release, Vybornov met with Kabila on September 12 in Kinshasa. The official statement reports: "The discussion resulted in the decision that, in the framework of its cooperation with the DRC, ALROSA will carry out detailed exploration of a diamond deposit in the south of that African country." A source close to Vybornov refused to identify the deposit.

"In agreement with the Congo side," he told Mineweb, "we do not say more than is disclosed in the press release we've published. We will be back to this question, but later."

Alrosa first opened talks with Kabila and the Congolese when Vybornov's predecessor, Alexander Nichiporuk, visited Kinshasa in April 2005. Alrosa's involvement in the DRC at that time also involved controversial links to two Israelis, Arkady Gaydamak and Dan Gertler.

Gaydamak was active in introducing Nichiporuk in neighbouring Angola; Gertler in the DRC. Gertler was then personally close to Kabila, and through a company he and others ran, Canadian-registered Emaxon Finance Corporation, Gertler held the marketing concession for 88% of the DRC's diamond exports. Alrosa's interest in Gertler was intended to buttress the break the Russian company had made with Lev Leviev, the biggest of the Israeli diamantaires, with whom, until then, Alrosa had been partnering for the sale of diamonds from the Catoca mine in Angola.

According to a letter on an Alrosa letterhead, dated June 22, 2005, Nichiporuk purportedly made an offer to buy a 54% shareholding in the DRC's Sengamines mine and licences for about $60 million. The text proposes a down-payment of $8 million "to cover current justified outstanding expenses", and $60 million payable over the time it would take for Alrosa to bring the mine into production and sell its diamonds, with a calculation of $1 for each carat sold. The proposal also allowed Alrosa three years from the start of its agreement for start-up of production.

The document was later judged to be a forgery. However, Alrosa has confirmed that it had been studying a number of diamond assets in DRC, including Sengamines.

In 2006, Nichiporuk's initiative in the DRC, as well as Angola, came under attack from his rival, Sakha region president, Vyacheslav Shtirov, who accused him of shorting investment in Sakha, and favouring Africa instead. Shtirov's campaign to oust Nichiporuk intensified through the year, and led, in February 2007, to his replacement by Vybornov.

A year elapsed before Vybornov ventured in Nichiporuk's footsteps in central Africa. He first met Kabila at an undisclosed location in the DRC on March 18, this year, following stops in Namibia, where he met President Hifikepunye Pohamba, and also Angola, where he met President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The communiqué issued after the Kabila meeting said Vybornov's talks focused on "issues related to cooperation between ALROSA and the DRC in diamond exploration and energy sector".

The shareholding ownership and control of Sengamines has been contested for several years, and was the subject of a United Nations report in 2002, which was subsequently corrected. Export sales in the three-year period, 2001-2003, according to a report from Antwerp, averaged just under 80,000 carats per month, at a very low average value of under $15 per carat. In that period, marketing was taken over by AP Diamonds, run in 2003 by Geoffrey White for Oryx Natural Resources, a company whose African operations and shareholding have also been the subject of much controversy.

The Emaxon agreement to take over marketing of DRC diamond production was reported to have commenced in April 2003. Arguments have followed over the terms of the deal, and the diamond valuations and revenues realized by the agreement. The US publication Newsweek quoted a Congolese official as claiming that during 2007, the monthly sales average fell from a high of $16.75 per carat to a low of $12.99.

In 2006, Nunn and FAD signed a purchase agreement for an 80% stake in Sengamines, while Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA), the DRC state diamond producer, held 20%. The deal required returning Sengamines to exploration status, in order to assess the potential of the concession. The two partners agreed to change the name of the operating company to Entreprise Minière de Kasa' Oriental SARL (EMIKOR). Nunn then opened negotiations with international diamond miners to help him finance a new mining plan. De Beers was one of his targets; Alrosa was another. But Nunn did not sign a major deal.

Nunn is in the DRC this week, but he told Mineweb through a spokesman that FAD has invested about $20 million in Sengamines, "with half of this being used to settle debts accumulated by the former management, and duly done in accordance with specific requests made by the DRC Government when approving FAD's involvement in the project. FAD has also invested in maintenance and exploration work as well as other costs related to the project." In addition, FAD says it has undertaken "a comprehensive feasibility study as well as maintained the property and continued with all social upliftment and community support programs."

On March 29 of this year, at the traditional overview for shareholders which Alrosa leaders give each year at Mirny, both Vybornov and Alrosa board chairman, Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, explained that what they are doing in Angola and DRC is a hedge against the rising costs and technical risks of underground mine production in Russia.

On April 14, Nunn's spokesman told Mineweb, "a group claiming to be Government representatives, accompanied by heavily armed police and army arrived at Sengamines and forcefully and illegally expropriated the property, equipment and assets without justification, explanation or legal supporting documentation. FAD representatives were given 48 hours to leave the property and were stopped from taking any company documents. The plant, machinery and assets which have been illegally confiscated are estimated to have a value of approximately $65 million based on company records of investments made by the previous owners and subsequently by FAD."

FAD followed on April 22 with a notice from its lawyers, Simmons and Simmons of Paris, informing the DRC government that it was declaring force majeure at the project. FAD says that "on numerous occasions [it] communicated with the DRC Deputy Minister of Mines to resolve any differences and to continue the evaluation and development of the project, and has received various verbal reassurances in this regard. FAD has also made several requests for an audience with the Minister of Mines and with President Kabila to clarify the DRC Government's expectations of FAD in respect of Sengamines."

According to his spokesman in Johannesburg, Nunn "has long been an investor in the DRC, as well as a great admirer of president Kabila. Mike has been an enthusiastic supporter of South African investment into the DRC and has been involved with several SA Government missions to the DRC, introducing and SA politicians and businessman to promote investment in the DRC.

FAD is bitterly disappointed at this treatment after investing in Sengamines at the specific personal request of President Kabila during his presidential election campaign, after an introduction by [SA] President [Thabo] Mbeki."The source added that joining Nunn and FAD in its arbitration challenge in Geneva is AMIL, described as a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, the $60 billion sovereign wealth fund of the Qatar state, based in Doha.

In the DRC, in addition to the active measures taken to annul Nunn's First African Diamonds deal, and replace it with a new source of finance and mining expertise for Sengamines, there has also been a fierce challenge to the five-year old Emaxon marketing deal. Also in April of this year, MIBA officials announced they had terminated the Emaxon marketing right, and would conduct open auctions of rough instead.

Additional Reading:

Russian Expansion in Africa Continues

Russian Beneficiation

Russian Expansion in Africa Continues

Russia Reduces Auctions of Special Diamonds, Lifts Sight Values

Alrosa chief says weak dollar will force diamond industry to act

The Three Industry Wild Cards

Africa: The Bear And the Dragon

The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming

Vybornov: Demand is Growing and the Supply is a “Bit Stuck” Versus Siberian Diamonds Limited

Historical Feature:The Lev Leviev Group Takes on De Beers

Natalia Sarsadskikh - Indicator Trailblazer at Yakut - World's Largest Diamond Mine Part 2 Mirny Siberia

World's Largest Diamond Mine

Russian Update

From Russia With Love

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Diamond Imports


Today in History

1970 King Hussian of Jordan launches an attack against Palestinian guerrillas all across Jordan in what becomes known as Black September.

1787 Under the chairmanship of George Washington, 39 delegates out of a possible 42, officially approve and sign the Constitution of the United States of America.

1931 American film actress Anne Bancroft born in New York City - real name Anna Maria Louisa Italiano. Marries director Mel Brooks in 1964. Most memorable appearance is as 'Mrs Robinson' in the 1967 film 'The Graduate'.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Sierra Leone Sells First Gems

“Invincible Spirit” Maxwell Fornah and Victor Musa, members of the Single Leg Amputee Sports club of Sierra Leone chase for the ball whilst playing football in Freetown, Sierra Leone Thursday 06 April 2006. There are more than 6000 amputees in Sierra Leone as a result of the brutal civil war. Charles Taylor the former Liberian leader is accused of backing a rebel group that cut off limbs,mutilated and raped thousands of civilians in Sierra Leone. The Single Leg Amputee Sports club of Sierra Leone has toured to Brazil to play against disabled players there and will host the disabled football championships in Sierra Leone in February 2007

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Sierra Leone underground diamond mine sells first gems
Reuters
Tuesday September 16 2008
By Katrina Manson
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FREETOWN, Sept 16 (Reuters) - Sierra Leone's only underground diamond mine has sold its first gems, bringing it a step closer to full-scale production and a stock market listing next year, one of its parent companies has said.

Stellar Diamonds, majority-owned by Mano River Resources, said its Kono Kimberlite Diamond Project joint venture sold 1,049 carats at a sale last week.

Petra Diamonds owns 51 percent in the Kono project.

The Kono project is working under an exploration licence but plans to apply for a full diamond mining licence next year, Stellar Chief Executive Karl Smithson told Reuters this week.

Smithson did not give the total value of last week's sale, but said the largest diamond, at 10.55 carats, raised $31,000.

The Kono project is the first underground diamond mining scheme in Sierra Leone, charting the length of kimberlite dykes beneath the surface in the diamond-rich east of the country.

Currently mining at up to 65 metres depth from two shafts, the company hopes to dig down to 120 metres, requiring underground railway tracks and ventilation systems.

"It's pioneering stuff in this country," Smithson, who worked for 10 years as a geologist with the world's biggest diamond company, de Beers, told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.

"We need to test for another three to six months, which probably involves another three sales, but we're quite confident that we're going to get over $200 per carat. That's very good, very high value," he said.

The Kono mine, like Stellar's wholly-owned Mandala alluvial prospecting operation in neighbouring Guinea, expects to starting full production next year.

Stellar hopes Kono's revenues will eventually earn about $40 million a year, paying $14 million a year to the cash-strapped Sierra Leone government in taxes and royalties.

"We've got 300 Sierra Leonean staff on this project and that's going to double in the future," Smithson said.

Staff are trained in rock drilling, blast cuts and other skills, a boon in a country ranking last in the U.N. Human Development Index where up to two-thirds of people are jobless.

"The local labour force is great -- intelligent, eager and very hardworking. Some of the shifts are now run totally by Sierra Leoneans without expats. They see an opportunity and they're taking it with both hands."

POLITICS TOUGH BUT IMPROVING
Mano River Resources entered Sierra Leone at the height of the 1991-2002 civil war, which killed around 50,000 people and involved multiple atrocities committed by child soldiers.
Stellar is raising 2 million pounds ($3.52 million) from European and British institutions and wealthy investors.

"Investors used to think we were crazy but there's a bit of a different perception of the whole region now. We knew the politics was tough but politics improves over time and the geology stays the same, so we targeted these areas," he said.

"The big companies are looking for monster mines and they don't feel that they're here, but there are still plenty of medium and small mines that can be viable for a company such as ourselves. We have first-mover advantage."

The government is reviewing all mining contracts, which Smithson said would clear out inactive licence holders.

Stellar is also prospecting at four other diamond mines in southern and eastern Sierra Leone, as well as Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"We hope to have two producing mines in 2009," said Smithson.
(Editing by Alistair Thomson)

***

Additional Reading:

The Lure of Sierra Leone Diamonds

Sierra Leone: Who Owns The Country's Diamonds?

The Trial of Charles Taylor

Insider witness tells of taking arms, diamonds for Charles Taylor

Liberia: 75 Million British Pounds Spent On Taylor's Trial So Far

“MERCHANT OF DEATH” ARRESTED IN THAILAND

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Kono, Sierra Leone. Diamonds are who’s best friend exactly? September 1st, 2007

Sierra Leone: Brig. Nelson-Williams is New Chief of Defence Staff
On Friday September 12 President Ernest Bai Koroma appointed Brigadier Alfred Claude Nelson-Williams (SL 215) of the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) as the country's new Chief of Defence Staff.

***

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Today in History 17th September 1978

Camp David Accords signed

Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign two frameworks for peace in Washington, D.C. Negotiated at U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David retreat, it was the first peace accord between Israel and one of its Arab neighbours. Six months later, a formal peace treaty was signed at the White House, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties. For their achievement, Sadat and Begin were awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize. However, Sadat’s peace efforts were not so highly acclaimed in the Arab world and he was assassinated in 1981 by Muslim extremists in Cairo. Egyptian-Israeli peace continues today.

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De Beers Abdicates


Where's De Beers?

September 15, 2008

JCK columnist Ben Janowski just sent in his November column, with his reactions to last week's Rapaport conference.

Here is a taste, which included something I didn't notice, but is pretty striking:

Remarkably, not once in the entire day was there a single mention of De Beers or the DTC.

For as long as I can remember diamond people have fussed over De Beers’ actions and statements, worrying about what they are doing or planning to do.

Now, it seems, De Beers has marginalized itself.

Then he notes the reason for this “marginalization”:

Supplier of Choice has faded to little more than an abusive application process every few years.

The DTC cannot fulfill the original intent, which is to be able to offer its clients the selections they need and want.

The surcharge on sights, meant to finance expert marketing assistance, has become a cash handout to clients to support their internally developed marketing efforts.

And De Beers’ own marketing and advertising budget has been slashed everywhere in the world ...

All this has, of course, good and bad points.

When you think about it, it’s staggering that, for over 100 years, this industry was run by one company.

It's probably a pretty big reason why this industry has been slow to modernize.

On the other hand, De Beers' "abdication" is pretty monumental and the industry is still coming to terms with it.

De Beers’ biggest contribution to the industry was its marketing campaign. So who will take over for them now?

IDMA?

Posted by Rob Bates on September 15, 2008

Additional Reading:

De Beers Polishes Its Image

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Russian Expansion in Africa Continues


Joseph Kabila - the son of the assassinated Laurent Kabila

MOSCOW, September 12 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's largest diamond producer Alrosa said on Friday it will prospect for diamonds in southern sectors of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The decision was made at a meeting between Alrosa CEO Sergei Vybornov and Congo President Joseph Kabila.

On March 18, 2008 as part of his African tour ALROSA President Sergey Vybornov had a meeting with President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Joseph Kabila.

The discussion centered on issues related to cooperation between ALROSA and the DRC in diamond exploration and energy sector.

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Alrosa has a number of diamond producing projects in neighboring Angola, where it has two joint ventures.

The Russian company has a 32.8% stake in Catoca Ltd, and the LUO-Kamachia-Kamajiku mining company, where it controls 45%.Alrosa accounts for 97% of Russian and 25% of global diamond output.

It sold diamonds worth $146.7 billion in 2007. The main shareholders in the company are the Federal Property Fund (37%), private companies (23%), and the government of East Siberia's Yakutia Region (8%). http://en.rian.ru/business/20080912/116747636.html

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By John Helmer in Moscow

Alrosa has agreed to start diamond prospecting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at the request of President Joseph Kabila. But Alrosa sources say that details of the undertaking, and of a meeting Alrosa chief executive Sergei Vybornov had last week with Kabila, should be kept secret.

It is Vybornov’s second meeting with Kabila this year; the first occurred, with comparably little disclosure, in March.

According to a newrelease, Vybornov met with Kabila on September 12 in Kinshasa. The official statement reports: “The discussion resulted in the decision that, in the framework of its cooperation with the DRC, ALROSA will carry out detailed exploration of a diamond deposit in the south of that African country.” A source close to Vybornov refused to identify the deposit. “In agreement with the Congo side,” he told Polished Prices, “we do not say more than is disclosed in press-relese we’ve published. We will be back to this question, but later.”

Alrosa first opened talks with Kabila and the Congolese when Vybornov’s predecessor, Alexander Nichiporuk,visited Kinshasa in April 2005.

Alrosa’s involvement in the DRC at the time also involved controversial links to two Israelis, Arkady Gaydamak and Dan Gertler. Gaydamak was active in introducing Nichiporuk in neighbouring Angola; Gertler in DRC.

Gertler was then personally close to Kabila, and through a company he and others rancalled Emaxon Finance Corporation held the marketing concession for most of the DRC’s diamond exports. Alrosa’s interest in Gertler was intended to buttress the break the Russian company had made with Lev Leviev, the biggest of the Israeli diamantaires, with whom, until then, Alrosa had been partnering for the sale of diamonds from the Catoca mine in Angola.

According to a letter on Alrosa letterhead, dated June 22, 2005, Nichiporukpurportedly made an offer to buy a 54% shareholding in the DRC’s Sengamines mine and licences for $60 million. The letter was later judged to be a forgery. However, Alrosa had already been studying a number of diamond assets in the DRC, including Sengamines.

In 2006, Nichiporuk’s initiative in the DRC, as well as Angola,came under attack from his rival, Sakha region president, Vyacheslav Shtirov, who accused him of shorting investment in Sakha, and favouring Africa instead. Shtirov’s campaign to oust Nichiporuk intensified through the year, and led, in February 2007, to his replacement by Vybornov.

A year elapsed before Vybornov ventured in Nichiporuk’s footsteps in central Africa. He first met Kabila at an undisclosed location in the DRC on March 18, this year, following stops in Namibia, where he met President Hifikepunye Pohamba, and also Angola, where he met President Jose Eduardo dos Santos. The communique issued after the Kabila meeting said Vybornov’s talks focused on “issues related to cooperation between ALROSA and the DRC in diamond exploration and energy sector”.

The ownership of Sengamines has been contested for several years. In 2006, Mike Nunn, the South African chief executive of First African Diamonds, signed a purchase agreement for an 80% stake in Sengamines, while Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA), the DRC state diamond producer, held 20%. The deal required returning Sengamines to exploration status, in order to assess the potential of the concession.

The two partners agreed to change the name of the operating company to Entreprise Minière de Kasa’ Oriental SARL (EMIKOR).

On March 29, at the traditional overview for shareholders which Alrosa leaders give each year at Mirny, both Vybornov and Alrosa board chairman, Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, explained what they are doing in Angola and DRC as a hedge against the rising costs and technical risks of underground mine production in Russia.

In the DRC there have been active measures to annul Nunn’s First African Diamonds deal, and find a new source of finance and mining expertise for Sengamines.

There has also been a fierce challenge to the five-year old Emaxon marketing deal, In April of this year, MIBA officials announced that they had terminated the Emaxon deal, and would conduct open auctions of rough instead.Monday, September 15th, 2008
*

" The expansion of large Russian natural resources companies in Africa could become a driving force for Russia’s economic development. Projects in Africa are the most natural way of making Russian business, both commodities and machine building, transnational "
Andrei Maslov (Editor-in-chief of Af-Ro Russian-African Business Magazine)
*
*
Additional Reading on Past Belgian Congo Atrocities & More:





ILLICIT DIAMONDS FLOW Current: Antwerp during the Blood Diamond (Conflict Diamond) era and still today is the major world rough diamond recipient headquarter

***
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Today in History 1982

Massacres at Sabra and Shatila

Hours after the Israeli forces enter West Beirut, Phalangist militiamen begin a massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Within two days, 1,000 men, women, and children were dead. The Phalangists, a Christian faction in Lebanon, were closely allied with Israel.After entering West Beirut, Israeli commanders ordered the Phalangists into the refugee camps in search of terrorists, even though the militiamen were known to be enraged at the Palestinians for the recent murder of their leader. Israel later condemned the massacre and denied any responsibility. On September 29, a United Nations peacekeeping force returned to Lebanon to prevent more bloodshed.

Posted by The Diamond Guru

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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Top Web Site


Top Web Site

THIS SITE IS TRULY AMAZING

The 3rd Worldwide contest for the best web site on the net took place in the city of Venice .

169 countries participated, 38 were judges - Israel won the first prize!

http://www.cityofdavid.org.il


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Friday, September 12, 2008

Rio Tinto Survey Finds Rough Shortage #1 Concern for Industry

"The Diamond Trading Company [ De Beers marketing unit ] has a finite supply, which is significantly outstripped by the volume of rough diamonds being requested by applicants" :MD Varda Shine Dec'07

***
Diamond professionals consider the shortage of rough supply as the most important challenge facing the diamond industry during the next five years, according to a survey conducted by Rio Tinto Diamonds.
'The 2008 Survey of Rio Tinto’s Diamond Business Stakeholders' revealed that of the 159 people who participated - representing a 23 percent response rate - 31 listed the supply shortage as their chief concern for the coming years.

The second biggest challenge was pricing and lower profit margins, as expressed by 20 stakeholders, while synthetic / artificial diamonds was most prevalent for 19 participants.
Other major issues included ‘reputation, image, and marketing issues;’ supply chain transparency;and Kimberley Process compliance.

Just eight respondents said economic conditions were the most important challenges facing the industry. Source Rapaport Trade Wire 12th September 2008

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Today in History 12th September

1969 American President Richard Nixon orders the bombing of NorthVietnam to be resumed.
1959 The first spacecraft from earth to land on another planet. A Russian craft crash-lands on the moon.
1953 American Senator John F.Kennedy - later to be elected US President - marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island.
1940 In France, the discovery of the Lascaux Caves, containing many prehistoric wall paintings.
1935 United States multi-millionaire Howard Hughes achieves the first of several aviation records - flying a plane of his own design at 352.46 mph.

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Russian Beneficiation

The Ghost of Alexander Shkadov ?
Kristall Smolensk

A Sparkling Case for Russian Beneficiation

The diamond industry’s lexicon has dramatically changed during the past few years. Domestic beneficiation, added-value creation, and downstream developments in the producer countries are now the buzz words dominating the African producing countries. These words have also, albeit reluctantly and belatedly, been embraced by De Beers as a basis for its rough allocation policies.

Vladimir Putin

In contrast, the world’s second major producer, the Russian Federation, has gone amazingly silent on the subject. Russia’s former president and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has made it clear that he wants the federal government to absolutely control the Alrosa mining conglomerate – the position of government on beneficiation (manufacturing) seems unclear or, more correctly, ambiguous.

While African presidents, ministers and producers seek every possible public forum to espouse the perceived endless virtues of beneficiation, Alrosa’s enigmatic president, Sergei Alexandrovich Vybornov, doesn’t seem to miss an opportunity to express his wholehearted opposition to domestic beneficiation in the Russian Federation.

Sergei Vybornov of Alrosa

one of The Three Industry Wild Cards

Ostensibly, the opposition is based on strong economic convictions – the return on capital invested in diamond cutting is too low to be of interest. Or, it may well be based on a narrower Alrosa objective; the views espoused may not necessarily represent those of government. It is clear that Vybornov doesn’t like pressures to accommodate the domestic manufacturing sector by subsidizing rough allocations – something that was the case until a few years ago. It might happen again.

Regarding the view on low return of capital, we can only say: “Welcome to the club, Mr. Vybornov. You have astutely identified a global predicament facing diamond manufacturers who represent a highly undesired (and ultimately unsustainable) situation.” This is a condition, I would add in marketing jargon, “largely brought about by our favorite producers.” But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

Manufacturers are engaged in diamond manufacturing in locations where (1) either the activity makes the most economic sense; or (2) governments induce manufacturers to cut and polish in their territories. Though it all falls under the common denominator of beneficiation, the economic rationale in the latter case is affected by governmental policies. In many a country, a reduced economic rationale was or is complemented by subsidies, preferred access to rough or rough export taxes.

The truth is that some of the world’s greatest success stories in beneficiation can be found in the Russian Federation and, especially, in its main manufacturing center, the city of Smolensk. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that in 2007, some 50 Russian manufacturers produced some $1.2 billion worth of polished. Out of a total of 8,000 production workers throughout the Russian Federation (including Yakutia), some 3,500 are employed by some seven factories in Smolensk. Half of the Russian polished output comes from Smolensk, which has a well-developed support infrastructure of banks, diamond cutting training schools, tool manufacturers and suppliers, gemological research institutes, and grading labs, to mention but a few of the required attributes of a well-developed cutting center.

The largest manufacturer is the Kristall Production Corporation. If we go back to the beneficiation jargon, Kristall Smolensk is, by my reckoning, the world’s oldest and largest manufacturer in any producer country. It is now modestly celebrating 45 years of continuous operations. In 2007, Kristall Smolensk produced some $404 million of polished – almost the amount the 16 factories in Botswana hope to be jointly producing in a few years time.

Governmental Support for Kristall

In the former Soviet Union, the polishing industry was traditionally state-controlled. I recall that back in 1990, on the eve of the breakdown of the communist system, the Kristall factories were the manufacturing arm of the government-owned Glavalmazzoloto (a precursor to Alrosa). At that time, domestic output was about 1.5 million carats of mostly smalls or melee polished worth about $600 million. The industry then was famous for its make (the quality of the cut) because of the total disregard of the optimization of manufacturing yield and the desire to deliver manufacturing quotas of goods characterized by perfect proportions.

In those years, observers claimed that Russia would get more foreign currency for exporting rough than for selling the resultant polished, something which might have been inherent to the non-market economic system. That never was a fair argument. One certainly could also argue that much or all of the diamond mining activities lacked sound economic basis.

What is clear is that Premier Nikita Khrushchev, while speaking at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961, demanded the stepped-up development of diamond mining and manufacturing mostly for purely strategic and security reasons. After World War II there was a great demand for natural industrial diamonds, and there was a Western boycott in place denying access to those goods to the Soviets. Economic considerations were not a factor then. Pleasing and satisfying the luxury needs for Western women was the least of Khrushchev’s concerns: he needed the industrial diamonds that De Beers refused to supply. Manufacturing gem-quality goods was a “by-product” – something that was beneficial to the regional economies.

Consequently, although diamonds were mined in Yakutia, Smolensk was singled out as the preferred city to establish diamond manufacturing. This had a reason. Smolensk, located on the Dniper River some 360 kilometers west/southwest of Moscow, is one of Russia’s oldest cities founded almost 2,000 years ago. The walled city was destroyed several times throughout its long history. It found itself on the invasion routes of both Napoleon and Hitler. Indeed, in Russian history, the Battle of Smolensk, which was launched in 1941, was the first Soviet counteroffensive against the German army; it resulted in 93 percent of the city being destroyed.

The government of the Soviet Union wanted to rebuild and restore Smolensk’s former glories and intentionally directed diamond manufacturing to that city. It was interested in creating employment and bringing other economic benefits to the area. Today, we would call it a policy of beneficiation aimed at providing skills – and hope – to the people who were rebuilding their ruined cities.

In 1963, the Kristall Production Company was established alongside half a dozen other state-owned diamond plants in the Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia and Moscow proper.

In September 1988 Alexander Shkadov became the new head of Kristall.

One of the early managers of Kristall Smolensk was Alexander Shkadov, who was not just the leading diamond manufacturer but a progressive community leader and a driving force in regional politics. In 1986, he was shot and killed by political rivals.

[ The Ghost of Alexander Shkadov ? : Awaiting verification and possible amended correction. According to the author Chaim Even-Zohar, Mr. Alexander Shkadov was killed in 1986 but on the Kristal website Alexander Shkadov became the new head in 1988 pictured above. Alexander Shkadov is not identified in the picture but I assume he is the bald headed guy sitting in the front on the corner of the table with his much younger son Mr. Max Shkadov in the blue tie sitting alongside him pictured at a maturer 37 below.

:http://www.kristallsmolensk.com/factory/History/ : The Diamond Guru ]

[ Amendment added :

I checked my notes. It was a typo. Alexander Shkadov was killed in August 1988. The monument, in front of the Kristall building, gives that date.

Chaim Even-Zohar

The picture from Kristall Smolensk says September 1988 ?]

This year, Kristall Smolensk, the largest diamond manufacturer in Russia, is celebrating its 45th year of continued production. Managed by Maxim A. Shkadov, the son of Alexander, the company employs some 2,500 cutters (out of a total diamond employment of 3,500 in Smolensk). Kristall Smolensk produces over $400 million worth of polished per year, which is well over one-third of Russia’s total polished production. While other Kristall factories either went bankrupt or were privatized, Kristall Smolensk remained fully government-owned.

In a way, Kristall Smolensk management is faced by a modern version of “Mission Impossible”: on the one hand, it must show that it can compete competitively in the international manufacturing sector, while, on the other hand, it is still adhering to a “beneficiation model,” where contribution to the local welfare clearly remains a cornerstone in management strategies. Is that a sustainable model? The answer must come from government.

Though Kristall Smolensk is a DTC Sightholder most of its rough comes from Alrosa. The last few months, Alrosa has become the highest-priced rough producer in the market. Only a few weeks ago, DTC Managing Director Varda Shine left a $50 million rough allocation on Alrosa’s tables because the price was too high, at least in her view. The Kristall Smolensk people tell me that they can buy rough at five to six percent cheaper in Antwerp than they get it from Alrosa. At the end of the day, both Alrosa and Kristall Smolensk are government-owned. The situation simply seems to reflect an incongruity of policies, which is not unusual – not just in Russia but in other producing countries as well.

Unquestionably, Kristall Smolensk is truly the oldest manufacturing plant in continuous operation in probably any of the world’s diamond-producing countries. Under the management of Maxim Shkadov Kristall has become very efficient. It employs all of the latest Sarin and other cutting technologies. The quality of Kristall Smolensk’s manufacturing output is truly amazing. It has developed various brands and is producing the Dubai Cut, among others. Its Hearts and Arrows goods are simply breathtaking.

This is not the time to discuss Kristall Smolensk but rather to highlight the lack of Russian government guidance on beneficiation. The chairman of the board of Kristall Smolensk, Vladimir Rybkin, is the head of Russia’s Gokhran – a body controlled by the finance ministry. Alrosa’s Vybornov is also on Kristall Smolensk’s board as are several representatives of the Federal Agency for Managing Federal Assets. An important member of Kristall Smolensk’s board is Victor Nikolayevich Maslov, the governor of the Smolensk region.

What do the regional and federal governments want? Social and economic benefits to the region or the highest return on capital expressed in dividends to the state? Some argue that even a state company needs to satisfy the state by producing dividend checks. Others argue differently. And this makes the case of Kristall Smolensk so intriguing – because management is merely implementing the policies set by the board.

The support of social infrastructure in society (whether medical clinics, kindergartens, schools, etc.) are policies determined by the board. Kristall Smolensk is a profitable company. On the balance sheet, the company seems to do slightly better than breaking even, which is mostly attributed to a combination of the social and economic obligations to the community and the high cost of rough supply.

As previously alluded to, Alrosa, the company’s rough supplier, seems to move in different directions than De Beers. As was also illustrated in last week’s column on Botswana’s and De Beers’ opposition to beneficiation in Botswana just a decade ago, it was Alrosa that, in 1998, expressed great support for beneficiation. The company’s perennial and eloquent vice president, Sergei Oulin, said at a 1998 conference: “Alrosa pursues a policy aimed at supporting the domestic diamond cutting industry by supplying stable amounts and assortments of diamonds. Special terms and conditions are provided for state-owned cutting enterprises on the basis of bilateral cooperation agreements.”

Stressing the worldwide leadership role of Alrosa, the company spokesman stressed the virtues of its highly developed diamond processing sector and significant capacity of diamond cutting enterprises, its high export potential of the domestic diamond industry (about $1.5 to 2.5 billion annually), and the availability of skilled personnel and training systems.

A decade ago, Russia was responsible for 8 percent of the worldwide diamond manufacturing output. This has now declined to some 6.5 percent. Mostly thanks to Kristall Smolensk and to manufacturers in Yakutia, Moscow and a few other places, Russia is still a formidable factor in the polished markets. Whether the industry will grow will mostly depend on the policies, directions, and leadership of the federal government, the Yakutian government and Alrosa.

One may laud the virtues of a freely and fiercely competitive market, but in truth, at the end of the day, the Russian diamond manufacturing sector is not all that different from those in the African producing countries.

Maxim Shkadov, 37, is the director general of Kristall Smolensk, Russia’s largest polishing factory, president of the Russian Diamond Manufacturers’ Association, and vice president of the International Diamond Manufacturers Association (IDMA)

Maxim Shkadov and his colleagues at Kristall Smolensk deserve to be congratulated on their achievement and their skills in running a state-owned plant in a competitive market. They may discover, however, that their very own future may not be in their own hands.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2008, CHAIM EVEN-ZOHAR

Additional Reading:

Kristall to Increase Rough Buying Abroad by Factor of Eight

Kristall of Smolensk, Russia’s biggest diamond cutting enterprise plans to spend "at least $25 million" on rough diamonds abroad this year.

Kristall is De Beers' sole Russian sightholder, but currently buys 65 percent of its rough from Russian diamond miner ALROSA.

Kristall’s general director, Maxim Shkadov, has said the company was buying more rough diamonds abroad partly because ALROSA had increased prices. Source: Rapaport Trade Wire 12th September 2008

***

Back in the early 1970's ( yes last century ) when I was apprenticed to my late father, a manufacturing jeweller, I had the boring job of filing out and removing the Russian Communist hammer & sickle logos from eighteen karat white gold ring mounts which were hallmarked into the inside of the ring shanks.

It was a sign of the Cold War times.

My late father imported Russian cut diamonds which were superior in cut grade quality but the deal was that you had to acquire a certain proportion of ring mounts as part of the transaction.

Today I still have a ring left from this now redundant design range but sadly the hammer & sickle logo has been removed.

It would have been nice to retain a piece of history but it was a sign of the times that the Russian bear was both feared and hated.

My father , himself an escapee from Communist rule after surviving the Nazis, felt uncomfortable with the promoting the Russian Communists at the time in case others may have found him to be a sympathetic supporter.

Needless to say at the time it was not a viable deal to continually be burdened with the extra purchase of gold which added to the cost of the Russian cuts known as "Silver Bears " so he ceased importing Russian cut diamonds.

I actually wear a gent's ring with some round brilliant Silver Bears...optical symmetry at the time was not as important then as it is now but the fire of these diamonds still mesmerizes me considering how many diamonds I have seen in the past and will in the future.

It certainly was a cutting style that has now been forgotten with the advent of more sophisticated diamond cutting technology these days.

The Diamond Guru

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Russian Expansion in Africa Continues

Russia Reduces Auctions of Special Diamonds, Lifts Sight Values

Alrosa chief says weak dollar will force diamond industry to act
The Three Industry Wild Cards
Africa: The Bear And the Dragon
The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming
Vybornov: Demand is Growing and the Supply is a “Bit Stuck” Versus Siberian Diamonds Limited
Historical Feature:The Lev Leviev Group Takes on De Beers
Natalia Sarsadskikh - Indicator Trailblazer at Yakut - World's Largest Diamond Mine Part 2 Mirny Siberia
World's Largest Diamond Mine
Russian Update
From Russia With Love

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Today in History 1977

Day of Martyrs

On September 12, 1977, Stephen Biko, leader of South Africa's Black Consciousness movement, dies shackled on the filthy floor of a police hospital. Earlier that month, he was nearly beaten to death by Afrikaner police in Port Elizabeth for his alleged subversion. News of the political killing, denied by the country's minority white government, led to international protests and a U.N.-imposed arms embargo against South Africa.On September 12, 1978, the first annual Day of Martyrs was observed by opponents of apartheid around the world to remember those who gave their lives in the struggle. Apartheid finally ended in South Africa in 1991.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

GIA BRIBERY DIAMONDS

" Our actions , whether individually or collectively, leave an imprint on our brand "
*
" Embedded in those initials [GIA] and in that slogan are the precious qualities that form the soul of GIA : independence, integrity, honesty......a consistent sense of mission "
GIA Chairman Ralph Destino
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GIA " THE FOREMOST AUTHORITY IN GEMOLOGY " trademark
*
*
*
AS ADVERTISED BY DROP SHIPPERS
*
WHO MARKET VIRTUAL DIAMONDS
*

IF YOU THINK IT IS GOING TO BURN NOW

WAIT UNTIL YOU PAY FOR IT.

NAME THE GIA BRIBERS !

INTEGRITY ???

Chairman Destino says all of us from students, alumni, staff to governors " is a caretaker of the brand "

Chairman Destino requests that we should " all pledge to be ambassadors of the brand , fully committed to preserve and enhance what has to be enviably created by those who have gone before". Source: GIA The Loupe Summer 2008


Daniel F Katz GG, GIA Alumni Association Member #4833090 appointed caretaker and ambassador of the GIA brand, courtesy of Ralph " Larry Rhetoric " Destino, Chairman GIA.
*
In Australia, I am not interested in endorsing perceived corrupt inaccurate GIA diamond grading reports that are NOT guaranteed.
*
GIA graded diamonds should be considered suspect as potential GIA bribery diamonds until the names of those actual bribers are disclosed.

***

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Today in History 2001

Terrorist attack the twin towers in NY

Two hijacked planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Thousands of people were killed by the impact, and by the dramatic, and tragic collapse of the buildings. Many more are injured in an almost simultaneous attack on the Pentagon in Washington DC. It is the single largest terrorist attack that the world has ever known, and sends shock waves across the world.

More Demands From Islam

A Word to Islamofascists

So you want to boycott Israel ?

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Hearts & Arrows Diamonds : Historical Feature



Hearts and arrows diamonds were the first copy of EightStar's eminent success in Japan.

EightStar� diamonds made their debut in Tokyo in 1984 in Yotsuya, the financial heart of Japan.

EightStar� represented an advancement that still today is so large, so comprehensive that it is just now beginning to be understood for its full impact.

The radical change in the technology used to decide how a diamond is performing, the technology of today, in other words, stems directly from the invention of the EightStar diamond and its intimate relationship to the FireScope�, the first viewing instrument in the world to be used to see how a diamond performs.

Hearts and arrows diamond came to the market late in 1988, more than four years after the EightStar� diamond had been declared to be the new world standard for round brilliant cut diamonds.

They did not improve on EightStar�.

In fact, they began to be mass produced in such large numbers that they became more and more inferior copies of EightStar� diamonds.

Today there are hundreds of companies making hearts and arrows diamonds.

All of them are sold using a cheap viewer known generically as the hearts and arrows viewer which allows you to see what the diamond does with the light it receives on its main facets.

There are 16 of these main facets.

A round, brilliant cut diamond has 57 facets and one more if there is a culet ticked onto the diamond for a total of 58.

What is vastly more important, which the toy like viewer for hearts and arrows diamonds completely ignores, is the view of the other 42 facets of the diamond any of which could be allowing light to pass through, leaking, in other words, and killing the brilliance of the stone.

It is not at all uncommon for hearts and arrows diamonds to be cut with severely reduced brilliance.

Most hearts and arrows diamonds leak light in the area near the girdle creating a "dead zone" of lost brilliance.

This phenomenon has the net effect of making the diamond look smaller than it really measures with a millimeter gauge.

The EightStar diamond NEVER has this problem.

Our diamonds appear larger than hearts and arrows diamond that weight the same amount as ours and have none of the facet twist in the non-main faceting areas; hence our diamonds are more brilliant and appear larger than almost every hearts and arrows type diamond sold in the world today.

If you were to line up one hundred hearts and arrows diamonds side-by-side, you would be astonished and disappointed by the differences you would see.

In the FireScope you would see one hundred completely different diamonds.

However, were you to perform the same experiment with EightStar� diamonds, you would be ASTONISHED by the exact similarity, the uncanny resemblance of each EightStar� diamond to every other EightStar� diamond.

This is the foremost difference between our diamonds and, not just hearts and arrows type diamonds, but every other diamond on earth.

Hearts and arrows came to the market because a clever marketer discovered that by turning the diamond up-side-down in a viewer one could see a pattern of facet reflections that have the general appearance of 8 hearts.

In the right-side-up position there are arrows which appear.

The person who discovered this went to a marketing firm in Tokyo with this discovery that prompted the marketing firm to create an advertising campaign -- a very successful one -- based on: "The hearts of love and the arrows of cupid".

The EightStar� diamond also shows a pattern of these hearts in the up-side-down position.

We do not emphasize this because we are not interested in clever marketing ploys to create a fascination for something besides the diamond.

Our diamonds stand alone on the merits of their optical performance, their incredible fire and definitive brilliance.

In other words, our diamonds appeal because they are beautiful, because they are special in that they lead the world for what they are, not for the image created around a marketing campaign.

We do not wish our diamonds to be thought of as hearts and arrows diamonds because they are EightStar� diamonds, a stand-alone category of perfectly brilliant, perfectly fiery diamonds, incredibly consistent diamonds. Source: EightStar

Additional Reading:

Learn About Hearts & Arrows here

Beware of GIA Lasered "H & A" Diamonds

Hearts & Arrows Diamonds

Buy the Diamond, NOT the Brand

The Diamond Vendor's Sale Gimmick ?

***

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Today in History 1976

Chairman Mao dies

Mao Zedong, Chinese revolutionary and statesman,

dies at the age of 83.

In 1934, during his long civil war with the Nationalists, he broke through enemy lines and led his followers on the Long March to northern China. There, he built up his Red Army and fought against the Japanese invaders. In 1945, civil war resumed, and in 1949 the Nationalists were defeated and Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China. As leader of Communist China, Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, programs that reformed the Chinese economy and society at the cost of millions of lives. Nevertheless, he maintained fanatical followers all across China and remains one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. After Mao's death, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China's leader.

Posted by The Diamond Guru

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GIA : Hypocrites & Bribery Diamonds

GIA graded diamonds should be considered suspect as potential GIA bribery diamonds until the names of those actual bribers are disclosed.
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* "Many in our industry are also speculating that the there are thousands of stones whose [ GIA ] grades are suspect." : Thomas Moses addressing the World Federation of Diamond Bourses in Mumbai, India 13th November 2005

* " ...the Certifigate scandal covers a wide range of fraud, corruption, bribery, and forgery. We are talking about serious offenses. Whoever recognizes these basic elements has the answer to where we are heading: criminal matters must be dealt with and resolved in a court of law. It is just that simple." : Chaim Even-Zohar

* " The Diamond Dealers Club South Africa rule provides for one clarity and one colour grade latitude in classification to it's members.Any further latitude entitles the DDCSA to take action as they have done in the past against any offending members.The notice served to confirm that when a member sells a diamond, they cannot legally hide behind an inaccurate classification they know to be wrong."25th April 2008 Inaccurate Diamond Grading Certificates, Memorandum from Diamond Dealers Club South Africa

* " If you stay away from the above [ GIA Board of Governors ] you have a better chance at running a clean company."12-May-2008 Joseph L., New Jersey

* " ...the object is to put people in jail who deserve to be there and to FIX the GIA (not destroy it) by excising the cancers that seem to still exist there. It is seemingly run like a self perpetuating oligarchy for the benefit of very few. "13-May-2008 Marty Haske

***
Larry a real clown above

GIA Chairman Ralph Destino

One of the " GIA Three Stooges "

Mr Ralph ( Rhetoric Larry ) Destino, the GIA chairman, was appointed as the troubleshooter to calm everyone down.

" Ralph Destino, Chairman Emeritus, Cartier, Inc. A Fifth Avenue daylight stroll with Ralph Destino is a Trump-like experience. He waves to well-heeled friends, shakes hands with another luxury goods mogul, nods to a current golf buddy. Simply put, Destino is the definition of upscale finery to an entire generation of corporate leaders " : Harry Feinberg
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King Ralph Rhetoric Larry Destino is on record saying “ we recognize that there may be an undesirable appearance of impropriety which we must avoid ” in regard to past donations given by diamantaires.
*
Appearance ? Is Destino fair dinkum ? Appearance? Facade would be more appropriate.
*
What does bribery, exaggerated and inaccurate diamond grading reports actually entail ?
*
Destino has no credibility !
To be blunt he is the GIA spin doctor.
GIA has gone to extraordinary lengths, including what we believe is a contempt of court by ignoring a sub poeana , to cover up what many of us all believe was fraudulent activity.
*
" It is finally time GIA was held accountable...........Destino is the wrong man for GIA, he was on the board that allowed the scandal in the first place "11-May-2008 Ron K

***
In the current GIA rag " The Loupe" GIA World News Vol 17 No.3 Summer 2008 the chairman's message from Ralph Destino is titled: " We Are All Caretakers of the GIA Brand".

Mr Ralph " Larry Rhetoric " Destino's article focuses on two key words.

Globalization and Branding..... yes we all understand but at what cost ?

" Rhetoric Larry " Destino says " they are the banners that identify what many feel are the two most pronounced commercial mega trends of the day ".

Rhetoric Larry continues, " ... the definition I like best as it relates to GIA is that a brand is a collection of experiences and associations attached to an organisation that gives rise to the level of services and promises that it can be expected to deliver".

Destino refers to these as " concrete symbols" that relate to the logos , history heritage and reputation that are " connected to that organization " and identifies the " GIA brand " in the same category.

Destino continues that in 77 years, GIA, " the foremost authority in gemology " TM " have come to represent the visible outlines of our brand, the symbolic perimeter that surrounds it "

" Embedded in those initials [GIA] and in that slogan are the precious qualities that form the soul of GIA : independence, integrity, honesty......a consistent sense of mission "

Destino then proceeds to drop the names of GIA pioneers Messrs Shipley, Liddicoat and Crowningshield as a testament to GIA's former greatness.

The GIA brand " must be nourished and protected every day if it is to survive in it's leadership position ".

" Our actions , whether individually or collectively, leave an imprint on our brand " Destino further added

Our brand ? How benevolently socialistic of dear Ralph. Incredibly thoughtful and kind.

Destino says all of us from students, alumni, staff to governors " is a caretaker of the brand "

Destino requests that we should " all pledge to be ambassadors of the brand , fully committed to preserve and enhance what has to be enviably created by those who have gone before".

The hypocrisy of Destino's comments simply astonish me. Does he think that everybody is a sucker for the sewer of information that emanates from his limited narrow minded perspective of the world?

It's a terrible worry if people believe the BS.

Destino's words are an insult to all those who preceded him and currently to all those who once had the greatest respect for GIA educational and research facilities.
*
How presumptuous by Destino to assume that those of us who are past students and GIA Alumini members should be willing to represent GIA as ambassadors and caretakers of the GIA brand... aptly referred to as the Greedy Institute of Arrogance.... the internet certificate.
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GIA is a tax free educational organisation that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually that gave their former president Bill Boyajian a golden handshake amounting to USD$750,000.
*
William ( Billy-Boy ) Boyajian was the former GIA President who presided over GIA during the GIA Bribery Scandal coined as "Certifigate", the worst period of systematic corruption and graft in GIA's history supported by millions of dollars " donated " by generous diamantaires.
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" I am as committed to my family and my church as I am to GIA." : Bill Boyajian Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce 1st June 2005
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The truth is if those of us who are symbolically requested by Destino to represent the GIA as the " caretakers" or the " ambassadors " of GIA then as Destino implies may I suggest Destino and his other colleagues on the GIA Board of Governors would not be there today.
*
Destino is asking of us to back him up and the GIA Board of Governors ?
Why ?
They have failed and it is not our job...it's theirs'.
Why should any of us support the corruption that has permeated GIA?
*
If those reponsible for handing out GIA's money to Bill Boyajian to the tune of USD$750,000 and numerous out of court settlements in an attempt to sweep unsavoury incriminating matters under the carpet I am sure Messrs Destino & Co are being well compensated financially for their services to GIA.
*
Destino really has a chutzpah to even assume and request of others to do the job he is being paid for.
*
NAME THE GIA BRIBERS !!!

Daniel F Katz GG, GIA Alumni Association Member #4833090 appointed caretaker and ambassador of the GIA brand, courtesy of Ralph " Larry Rhetoric " Destino, Chairman GIA.
*
In Australia, I am not interested in endorsing perceived corrupt inaccurate GIA diamond grading reports that are NOT guaranteed.
*
GIA graded diamonds should be considered suspect as potential GIA bribery diamonds until the names of those actual bribers are disclosed.

How would you know otherwise?

How is the diamond consumer protected ?
*
Additional Reading:

GIA Bribery Scandal Court Update

Historical Feature: GIA's Bribery Scandal Certifigate 1
RISKY CORRUPT GIA DIAMOND GRADING REPORTS Certifigate 2
GIA emerging from tough 18 months, but it's still setting the standard Certifigate 3
Upgrading the Jennifer Lopez Pink Certifigate 4
GIA " The Internet Certificate " Certifigate 5
GIA Bribery Accusations: Correspondence awaiting reply Certifigate 6
Certifigate: Rallying Support for Closure Certifigate 7
Kimberley Process,Corruption & Integrity: Is it failing ? Certifigate 8
U.S. Court Subpoenas GIA ‘Certifigate’ Records : Certifigate 9
TRUTH AND JUSTICE - NO BLACKMAIL OR EXTORTION : Certifigate 10
GIA’s Box of Trade Secrets : Certifigate 11 Reputation
GIA Versus DCLA
GIA " The Internet Certificate "
GIA Inaccurate Diamond Gradings More Evidence from those who bring you the worst coffee in the world !
Problems with GIA Graded Diamonds in Australia
GIA GTL's Colour Grading Of Fluorescent Diamonds
GIA Harms Its Own Brand - " GIA – the World’s Most Trusted Name in Diamond Grading and Gemstone Identification "
Australian Diamond Vendors Trade in Fear of Rejection
Round Brilliants: Analysis Of Brilliance
Diamond Grading & International Diamond Council
FAILED LEADERSHIP AND FRAUDULENT CERTIFICATES
Adamas Gemological Laboratory
Controversial GIA Fluff Letter Revealed: Dealers Protest
Beware of GIA Lasered "H & A" Diamonds
TRADE ALERT: Fake GIA Laser
International Diamond Council Diamond Grading Laboratories
http://www.independentlycertifieddiamonds.com/
GIA : What Some Diamond Dealers Are Saying
Diamonds: Undercutting Prices & Deceptive Websites
JAA Trade Alert- Inaccurate GIA & EGL Diamond Reports
EGL Int’l Says Falsely Accused by Australia’s JAA
GIA Forgery : Paraiba Tourmaline
GIA the Whore & " Malaya " Tourmaline ~ My liar, your liar, pants on fire !
DO NOT TAKE THE GIA GAMBLE !
GIA Royalty & Religion - Why Some Dealers Avoid Both.
Non Compliant Diamond Grading Laboratories in Australia
Beware:GIA Diamond Grading Reports
RISKY CORRUPT GIA DIAMOND GRADING REPORTS
GIA Hypocrisy Again
GIA " The Internet Certificate "


***

Diamond Imports


Today in History 10th September

1956 Born : The Diamond Guru much to Destino's disappointment. Happy Birthday to me !

1981: The Picasso painting 'Guernica' is returned to Spain after 40 years

On September 10, 1981, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso's monumental anti-war mural Guernica is received in the town of Guernica, whose suffering during the Spanish Civil War inspired the painting. In 1937, with the approval of Francisco Franco, Nazi Germany tested its deadly new air force on Guernica, a town in the independent-minded Basque region. In three hours of bombing, one-third of its 5,000 inhabitants were killed. In protest, Picasso painted Guernica from his exile in Paris.In 1939, the painting went to New York, where it remained, in accordance with Picasso's wishes, until democracy returned to Spain. It is now housed in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. Since 1997, Basque nationalists have been calling for its transfer to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

" Guernica "

Posted by The Diamond Guru

Labels: , , ,

Friday, September 5, 2008

Buying Diamonds Advice @ diamond exchange prices


Buying Diamonds - Diamond Buying Advice
3rd September 2008
Diamond Imports
In order to buy the best quality diamond there are things you must know and understand.

Do not rush in and buy a diamond on an impulse because it is advertised as a 'good deal' or is 'discounted'.

There are no bargains in diamonds and diamonds that are of excellent quality, cut and colour are not sold off cheap!

Always make sure you buy a loose diamond that has been independently certified and compare diamonds before making any decision.

Do not confuse a diamonds carat weight with the size of a diamond.

Even though two diamonds may have the same carat weight their appearance in size and diameter measurements can very greatly. A poorly cut 1.00ct diamond may look like a 0.75ct diamond from the top because they have the same diameter measurements even though their carat weights are different.

Diamonds are sold by their carat weight.

A diamond cutter always tries to retain as much carat weight and as few inclusions when cutting a diamond. Sometimes the cut of a diamond might be sacrificed in order to produce a diamond with a higher carat weight.

Diamonds that have a higher cut quality, excellent, ideal and very good cut diamonds, will sparkle with far more brilliance and fire than poorly cut diamonds which have a lower cut grade.

Buying a loose diamond for an engagement ring is a daunting task with so many jewellers, diamond dealers and diamond internet websites these days.

There is an abundance of information available to consumers, but not all of it is accurate.

This is probably one of the most important considerations to make when buying a diamond.
There is alot more to diamonds and their prices than just learning about the diamond's cut, colour, clarity, and carat weight.

All diamonds are unique, no two diamonds are exactly the same which is why it takes years of experience, training and learning to fully understand them.

Buy your diamond from a reputable diamond dealer.

Most diamond buying guides advise you on the 4 C's and suggest that you only shop at honest, reputable diamond dealers, but how does the average consumer determine this?

We always advise you to make sure that the diamond is certified and ask to see the actual certificate or diamond grading report to verify the diamond details and to see which laboratory graded the diamond.

The quality of the certificate, or lack thereof, goes a long way towards telling if you are dealing with someone reputable and professional.

A diamond certificate or grading report is only as good as the laboratory who issued it.

A diamond certificate, is only useful if it is reliable and has been issued by a reputable independent laboratory which has no financial interest in the stone.

If you've never heard of the institution that is offering a grading report, don't hesitate to ask about its credentials and that of the people who graded the diamond.

A diamond certificate documents the complete quality and description of the diamond, it includes information on shape, carat weight, clarity, fluorescence, colour grade, measurements, proportions and finish grade.

A diamond certificate also confirms that the diamond is natural and is not synthetic or man-made.

There is also the undeniable fact that some diamonds are treated or enhanced in some way, and these diamonds are very difficult, and in some cases impossible to identify, without the correct laboratory equipment.

Synthetic diamonds are the latest threat to the uneducated consumer.

If you are buying a diamond with out a recognized certificate (IE; a certificate recognized by either the WFDB, IDC, or CIBJO) it is possible that it may not be a Natural diamond at all.

Diamond certificates from respectable labs, meaning GIA, HRD, AGS or DCLA, are totally necessary if you want to compare diamonds intelligently.

Laboratories such as GIA, HRD, AGS and DCLA issue grading reports of the highest international standards. All of these diamond grading laboratories utilize strict procedures, have the most advanced equipment, and affiliations which meet the strict requirements for recognition by international trade organizations.

It is up to you, the consumer, to verify the credentials of the diamond grading laboratory and the diamond merchant, wholesaler or jeweller you are dealing with when buying diamonds or engagement rings.

Be even more cautious of website dealers who issue their own 'in house diamond certificates' or 'manufacturer's grading reports' as these simply are NOT independent certificates and they are NOT from a compliant laboratory.

Every diamond grading laboratory has a different set of parameters and specifications that they grade diamonds by and not all laboratories are as strict as each other.

In fact, some laboratories are popular with certain diamond dealers because they have a reputation for being generous with grades and are known not to be as strict as others.

As a leading diamond wholesaler we choose to only sell independently certified loose diamonds that have been graded by compliant, internationally recognized laboratories such as DCLA, GIA, HRD & AGS.

This translates to Global Assurance.
Diamond grading laboratories which grade to IDC International Diamond Council rules, do not just use the opinion and expertise of one person.

They must grade the diamond and have the opinion and consensus of three qualified diamond graders before the grade is applied to any diamond.

In Australia, DCLA is the only IDC diamond grading laboratory.

Valuations or appraisals are NOT the same as a diamond certificate or grading report.

It is important to remember is that a grading report or diamond certificate does not include an appraisal, or any kind of statement about the monetary value of the diamond.

***
Diamond Imports

sell the Highest Quality Certified Loose Diamonds
at wholesale diamond exchange prices.

Our diamonds are Independently Certified.

The Quality of our Certified Loose Diamonds
is Guaranteed.

Buy Certified Diamonds with Maximum Brilliance, Fire and Sparkle.


Posted by The Diamond Guru

Labels: , , , ,

GIA Bribery Scandal Court Update

Date: 7/17/2008 10:42:51 AM

Author: adamasgem

JKD [ Julius Klein Diamonds] doesn't want to let THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG

PLEADS for a SINGLE JUDGE to prevent GIA from following a single Judges' order.. AGAIN, HIGHLY PREJUDICIAL EVIDENCE EXPECTED TO COME OUT OF GIA..

http://www.clerk.co.montgomery.oh.us/pro/image_onbase.cfm?docket=13164637

GIA agrees it would let the cat out of the bag!!!! What a hypocrite GIA has turned out to be.

http://www.clerk.co.montgomery.oh.us/pro/image_onbase.cfm?docket=13183928

Marty Haske GG(GIA), Senior Member NAJA, ISA Appraisal Trained(past ISA), BS(MIT)/MS(MIT)Adamas Gemological Laboratory

***

In the state case the court ordered an in-camera (in chambers, secret) production of documents by GIA dealing with the ability of Julus Klein diamonds (JKD) to submit stones to GIA (Greedy Institute of Arrogance).

This followed GIA's and JKD's refusal to be deposed on this matter, i.e. bribery

Aledgedly, this priviledge was withdrawn by a letter banning business because of JKD's supposed involvement in the Certifigate bribery scheme. JKD appealed the courts ruling for production of documents by GIA, and JKD asked for an injunction preventing GIA from folllowing the court order until the appeal was head.

GIA, of course, filed a motion concurring with Julius Klien, in effect thumbing its nose at the state trial court.

The appeal was denied, and GIA has to provide the document to the court, or else probably face contempt of court sanctions.

Here is the state appeals court ruling.

http://www.clerk.co.montgomery.oh.us/pro/image_onbase.cfm?docket=13263338

Meanwhile, previously, on the other side of town, in the Federal case, where Stafford is suing JKD for the alledged theft of a 5+ carat pink diamond, , the federal court last week, said that Stafford did not have the right to re-open discovery (of GIA) , and Stafford's attorney said in the thread above (admissability of evidence filing to the federal pdf attachment) that the issue of whether JKD had submission priviledges was pertenent to the case because, in effect, once a crook, always a crook.

Since now in the state case, the documents would have to be producced, it sort of implied that they (documents in the state case ordered by the state court) would now be submitted to the Federal court.

In a close to 200 page transcript of a deposition of a JKD employee in the state case, the emplyeee basically said that JKD had submission priviledges and would get a certificate for the Pink diamond..

Both GIA and JKD have been trying like heck to cover this up for the Federal case, because along with the theft of the diamond, are issues of tampering with evidence, which triggers (under state law) punitive damages which far exceed the value of the diamond, something to the tune of 15 million dollars, which was mentioned in a typical (and legal) lawyers demand of settlement letter, which was termed extortion by JKD's lawyers in a filing and parroted (extortion as "fact") by the some of the trade press, as the courts so noted that in the federal case.

All the tip of the iceberg in the now becoming finally exposed Certifigate scandal.

The appeals have been an attempt by JKD to delay production of documents (GIA going along with it) , because the Federal case is supposed to start next month. JKD had argued in one of the cases that they didn't want to "let the cat out of the bag", by letting GIA testify that it no longer would do business with JKD.

Now, since the GIA was so successful in the past at NOT RELEASING NAMES of those involved in the Certifigate bribery scheme, things are starting to unravel, and maybe, just maybe, some of the participants willl start lining up to play let's make a deal with the Feds.

Because it certainly smells like, and has all the elements of, an open and shut RICO case to me, and may force the NYC Feds to do their job.

It has been posited that there might have been some behind the scenes cover-up already, involving the Feds in NYC, as the whole thing mysteriously died after the Pincione "settlement", a "in house invesitgation" managed by an MCI/Worldcom lawyer hired by GIA, and lip service to the trade about releasing names of dealers and possibly sightholders who were, on a long term basis, bribing GIA for better grades in a multi milllion dollar scheme, that probably went to the very top of GIA.

What confuses the issue is that the state case, which opened up this whole thing, as I interpret it, was entirely unrelated to Certifigate, in that it involved a business naming squabble between brothers, both of whom are in competing jewelry businesses, one of whom (Jim) called a JKD employee (partner? who he had prior personal and business relationships with) as a character witness (and then withdrew his name) and the other brother John, who was hoodwinked into sending a potentially very valuable Pink diamond to JKD for possible purchase after "certification" by GIA, something they apparently were not able to do, at least under the normal straight forward business channels, because of the Certifigate scandal.

It is somewhat convoluted, but it looks like GIA will be forced to release name(s) to the court, although if they reach the light of day is another thing.

Marty Haske GG(GIA), Senior Member NAJA, ISA Appraisal Trained(past ISA), BS(MIT)/MS(MIT)Adamas Gemological Laboratory

***

In the state case, after JKD (and GIA) exhausting the appeals process (so far), and getting their collective behinds whipped, the GIA apparently turned documentation over to the court ( in response to the courts order of 6/26/08) and the lawyers involved.

This is just a published receipt for same by one of the participating lawyers

http://www.clerk.co.montgomery.oh.us/pro/image_onbase.cfm?docket=13292982

Now will come the inevitable argument again that this information to wit: whether or not JKD had received a "banishment" letter from GIA because of grading bribery, will see public light.

This is important, because it could call into question the "true" grade of any diamond supplied to retailers and subsequent consumers, by JKD as well as a whole bunch of other wholesale diamond firms (which is my understanding).

Something GIA goes to great length to cover up..i.e.

1) GIA refusing to name the bribers

2) The federal government apparently doing nothing about the Certifigate scandal

3) Billy-Boy [Bill Boyajian] getting a > $750K golden handshake

4) The consumer and the retailers getting the shaft by a tax-exempt organization (GIA)

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock...

Marty Haske GG(GIA), Senior Member NAJA, ISA Appraisal Trained(past ISA), BS(MIT)/MS(MIT)Adamas Gemological Laboratory

***

Don't venture a guess other than "observations" that both JKD and GIA apparently royally pi**ed off the state court judge by not answering questions at the depositions, which resulted in the state court order.

I think that there is a better than 70% chance that it will be made public and get into the federal case.

Of course, if all of a sudden, the "Cat is let out of the bag", then I predict that JKD will be screaming all of a sudden for a "sealed" settlement in the Federal case.From what I have heard, both from Certifigate and this extension case, some people belong in jail, but the Manhatten Federal Prosecutor has apparently not done their job in the original Certifigate case and cover-up.

But of course, there may have already been a sealed slap on the wrist federally. That was GIA's spin doctors speciality (O'Niel), that is managing cover-ups.


Marty Haske GG(GIA), Senior Member NAJA, ISA Appraisal Trained(past ISA), BS(MIT)/MS(MIT)Adamas Gemological Laboratory

Additional Reading:

Historical Feature: GIA's Bribery Scandal Certifigate 1

RISKY CORRUPT GIA DIAMOND GRADING REPORTS Certifigate 2

GIA emerging from tough 18 months, but it's still setting the standard Certifigate 3

Upgrading the Jennifer Lopez Pink Certifigate 4

GIA " The Internet Certificate " Certifigate 5

GIA Bribery Accusations: Correspondence awaiting reply Certifigate 6

Certifigate: Rallying Support for Closure Certifigate 7

Kimberley Process,Corruption & Integrity: Is it failing ? Certifigate 8

U.S. Court Subpoenas GIA ‘Certifigate’ Records : Certifigate 9

TRUTH AND JUSTICE - NO BLACKMAIL OR EXTORTION : Certifigate 10

GIA’s Box of Trade Secrets : Certifigate 11 Reputation

GIA Versus DCLA

GIA " The Internet Certificate "

GIA Inaccurate Diamond Gradings More Evidence from those who bring you the worst coffee in the world !

Problems with GIA Graded Diamonds in Australia

GIA GTL's Colour Grading Of Fluorescent Diamonds

GIA Harms Its Own Brand - " GIA – the World’s Most Trusted Name in Diamond Grading and Gemstone Identification "

Australian Diamond Vendors Trade in Fear of Rejection

Round Brilliants: Analysis Of Brilliance

Diamond Grading & International Diamond Council

FAILED LEADERSHIP AND FRAUDULENT CERTIFICATES

Adamas Gemological Laboratory

Controversial GIA Fluff Letter Revealed: Dealers Protest

Beware of GIA Lasered "H & A" Diamonds

TRADE ALERT: Fake GIA Laser

International Diamond Council Diamond Grading Laboratories

http://www.independentlycertifieddiamonds.com/

GIA : What Some Diamond Dealers Are Saying

Diamonds: Undercutting Prices & Deceptive Websites

JAA Trade Alert- Inaccurate GIA & EGL Diamond Reports

EGL Int’l Says Falsely Accused by Australia’s JAA

GIA Forgery : Paraiba Tourmaline

GIA the Whore & " Malaya " Tourmaline ~ My liar, your liar, pants on fire !

DO NOT TAKE THE GIA GAMBLE !

GIA Royalty & Religion - Why Some Dealers Avoid Both.

Non Compliant Diamond Grading Laboratories in Australia

Beware:GIA Diamond Grading Reports

RISKY CORRUPT GIA DIAMOND GRADING REPORTS

GIA Hypocrisy Again

GIA " The Internet Certificate "

***

NAME THE GIA BRIBERS

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Posted by The Diamond Guru

Labels: , , , , ,

Diamonds: A Girl’s Best Path to Selflessness?


THE NECKLACE
Thirteen Women and the Experiment That Transformed Their Lives
By Cheryl Jarvis
210 pages. Ballantine Books.
***
One day at a mall in Ventura, Calif., a real estate agent named Jonell McLain had a retail epiphany. She had just sold a house and wanted to buy her clients a box of candy. Honestly that was all. That was the only reason she was out shopping.
But as Ms. McLain passed a jewelry store something stopped her in her tracks. It was a diamond necklace. “It was, she thought, simply exquisite — and exquisitely simple.” It was morally indefensible and outrageously expensive. And yet. And yet.
“Over the next three weeks Jonell was surprised how often she thought about the diamond necklace,” Cheryl Jarvis writes in “The Necklace,” an inspirational-bling book that means to position itself somewhere between “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Jonell McLain’s innocence turned inspirational when she realized she could buy the necklace for entirely unselfish and uplifting reasons.
What if a group of women were to split the purchase price, own the necklace together and set up a system for sharing it? What if they used their collective energy to help others, learn important life lessons and repudiate materialism? What if they “rewrote the narrative of desire”? It was this kind of thinking that would eventually lead Ms. McLain to want to write a column called “The Champagne Socialist” for a Ventura magazine.
And it was this selfless yet highly marketable ploy that led the story of the necklace to People magazine, “Today,” a movie deal and no doubt, imminently, the best-seller lists. What accounts for this instant popularity? Perhaps that everything about “The Necklace” can be summed up in a single sentence. “It’s the story of 13 women who transformed a symbol of exclusivity into a symbol of inclusivity and, in the process, remapped the journey through the second half of their lives,” Ms. Jarvis writes.
The inclusivity began at the haggling stage, when Ms. McLain and her friends returned to the jewelry store. Its proprietor, Tom Van Gundy, found these women surprising. Most of his female customers looked sad and needy. This bunch seemed happy and empowered. Mr. Van Gundy liked that. It made him want to accommodate them. “It was the same feeling he had when he played quarterback in high school and didn’t want to disappoint the fans,” according to the book.
But the women couldn’t quite match the purchase price. So Mr. Van Gundy had an idea. He looked at his wife, Priscilla, who did the store’s bookkeeping. She didn’t share the necklace-buyers’ warm glow. She looked beleaguered. She didn’t have female friends. Mr. Van Gundy realized that if he bought his wife a share in the necklace, he could make the sale, brighten lives, encourage sharing and make Priscilla smile again. The deal was done.
Then came the “possibility thinking,” the brainstorming, the rules. The women would have monthly meetings in their earth-tone living rooms, sharing mineral water, wine, goat cheese, artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes as they conducted business.
During one such meeting they decided to give the necklace a cute name. Now it was a she: Jewelia, in honor of Julia Child, who had lived nearby. The women of Jewelia, as they began to speak of themselves, sorority-style, learned to share their hopes and dreams as well as the necklace. And when they talked together, one of them noticed: “The women expressed differing opinions, but without raising their voices like the male pundits on Fox News. The women didn’t call one another ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid.’ ”
It was initially decided that each would have Jewelia for a month. Making love at least once while wearing the diamonds was mandatory. So much for the basics: now came creativity. Various Jewelia wearers went skydiving, karaoke singing, shooting, motorcycle riding. One of them insisted on wearing the necklace to a gynecological exam. The book includes photographic records of all of the above.
Because Ms. Jarvis writes in the simple, virtual Young Adult format of self-help, “The Necklace” gives each woman a stereotypical handle: “The Loner,” “The Traditionalist,” “The Leader,” “The Visionary” and so on. (“The Feminist” is the group’s only brunette.) It shapes each thumbnail character sketch to fit these stereotypes. And nobody does anything without finding a path to self-improvement.
Among the aphorisms that crown “Necklace” chapters are these: “Women friends are essential to a healthy life.” “It affirmed that I don’t need diamonds to be happy.” “We are not what we wear or what we own.” “Today when I look in my closet I feel sick.”
One member of the group wears the diamonds to bed, feels sexually reinvigorated, decides to lose 25 pounds and starts ordering special costumes — schoolgirl, cowgirl, harem girl, bar wench — that drive her husband wild. But most of the others learn preachier lessons. And most of these lessons are legitimately useful. The group unquestionably helps others by using the necklace to raise money for charities and by appreciating the intangible, self-actualizing gifts that can’t be had in jewelry stores.
But real honesty and insight are antithetical to this book’s experiment. It wants to simultaneously exploit and renounce the same craving. So the diamonds are cannily manipulated throughout “The Necklace” to both titillate and congratulate readers and to reinforce what they already know. On an outing one day Ms. McLain goes to a bookstore while her friend and necklace mate Patti Channer eyes a chiffon poncho. Which one of them will learn the error of her ways?
We aren’t what we own or wear. But we are what we read. And “The Necklace” will be read widely. Though Ms. Jarvis never says so, the best way to honor the book’s principles is to share your copy with a friend.
***
Diamond Imports

Posted by The Diamond Guru

Labels: ,

David Magang : One is the Loneliest Number

" In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king "
***
David Magang: Mutineer Turned Visionary


In October 1997, in a London conference hall, a “mutiny” took place. Few recognized it as such at the time. It was when the honorable David N. Magang, then Botswana’s Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Affairs, gave a speech in which he pointed out that some of the interests of De Beers and Botswana were shared but others were clearly different. He then made an impassioned plea for beneficiation and called for having “new, free-standing international competitive cutting factories in Botswana.” He broke the unwritten Botswana law of never attacking De Beers’ policies in public.

Magang’s speech also foreshadowed the breakup of the cartel when he unequivocally declared that Botswana “will not accept the burden of acting as the swing producer and buffer stock for the industry.” He concluded that his ambition was for Botswana to become a major world center for all aspects of the diamond trade. “For us, it is not just a preference but a political imperative that our citizens should be active in substantial roles in and around the industry which supports our economy,” said Magang.

De Beers was furious. Being in the audience, I realized at once that Magang had committed political suicide. De Beers was, in those days, so omnipotent in Botswana that no one got away with challenging their policies, which were basically the law of the land.

I respected Magang and enjoyed a few private conversations with him at the time. I was recently reminded of those discussions when I found myself quoted in one of the most remarkable bestsellers ever published in southern Africa, “The Magic of Perseverance,” David Magang’s memoir.


When, on April 1, 1998, the new Botswana president, Festus Mogae, had been sworn in, one of the very first presidential acts on that very same day was demoting Magang to Minister of Works, Transport and Communications.

Recalls Magang in his memoir: “To be honest, my redeployment was not exactly a bolt out of the blue; I had intercepted a fair amount of talk regarding it. To some well-placed people, in fact, it was not a matter of why or when; it was a matter of whether I would live to be redeployed. For instance, Chaim Even-Zohar, editor of a diamond magazine, told me that he knew as early as February that I would be shunted to another ministry when Mogae took the helm. To most of my well-wishers, my transfer, when it indeed occurred, was secondary; it was the fact that I was still in one piece, given my forthrightly candid views over De Beers vis-à-vis Botswanan diamonds, that gladden them.”

Magang’s 690-page book is a rare historical document in which a leading Botswana statesman shares his recollections and views of events over his lifetime. Magang touches on philosophical issues with regard to the roles of government cabinets and civil service, to mention but a few. The public debate in Botswana focuses mostly on governance concerns. But Magang also describes his many years of dealing firsthand with De Beers and on the ways in which the company operated during those years. Essentially, Magang concludes that De Beers had ways to secure support for its policies and actions.

The governance structure set up by De Beers in managing the diamond wealth removed Botswana officials from real decision-making or from finding out what was really going on, Magang says. “In an arrangement where half of the Debswana Board consists of its representatives, the Botswana Government can say that it has reasonable safeguards against unfair play on the part of its partner. That again is illusory. The indigenous people on the board are just too far removed from De Beers Centenary in Switzerland, let alone De Beers Consolidated Mines in South Africa, where strategies to profiteer at the expense of you-know-who are mapped out and kept under lock and key,” he writes.

Magang surmises that “the probity of our representative board members has at times been compromised. For instance, it is alleged that a Debswana MD, himself a member of the board, once circulated a memo in which he asked his compatriots to indicate whether they were interested in buying Debswana-owned houses at very relaxed rates. Who in his right mind would bother to probe an entity that gave such an advantage?” Later on, he recalls the Debswana-supported scholarships for children of high officials to study abroad.

Continues Magang: “Probably the most vulnerable of all is the MD. The Debswana MD is not a government appointee; he is head-hunted by De Beers, who then forwards his name to government for approval. The odds, therefore, are that his loyalty will be primarily to De Beers and secondarily to government. De Beers, in fact, made Debswana MDs so comfortable that in meetings with the movers and shakers of government, they championed De Beers’ positions as if they were sworn to martyrdom.” These are very serious allegations.

Cabinet’s Laughing-Stock

Magang recollects in his memoir how De Beers ensured that the few token factories that were established under great pressure never really were allowed to flourish. He is consistent in his views that Botswana had not been fully benefiting from its diamond riches. However, David Magang was truly a lonely man in these views and publicly never enjoyed any meaningful support, even though many agreed with him “in private.”

“In cabinet, I had no ally; those who supported me… only did so in private,” writes Magang. “I became the cabinet’s laughing-stock, being derided as ‘the only man in all of Botswana who dares advocate beneficiation.’ President Quett Masire for one said to me during one of our discussions in his office in 1996/97 that Botswana, once a poor country, was now what it was because of De Beers’ discovery of diamonds, in effect saying local beneficiation would be a slap in the face to De Beers. In correcting the president, I said it was not De Beers who had lifted us economically; it was our own, God-given resources.”

Magang continues: “The De Beers top brass knew that although I was the minister of mineral resources, I had no clout; my own colleagues had isolated me and so the De Beers directors bypassed me at will and went straight to my superiors. So every time I held meetings with them, they would already have seen the president and the minister of finance, and when I took a stance that countered theirs, they would simply say ‘But the president is already in accord with our viewpoint, and so is the vice president.’ If they had had the cheek, they might as well have denounced me as a nonentity.”

A few years after being fired from the Ministry of Minerals, and after some 25 years of serving his government, he left for private enterprise. Magang has actually done well for himself. Diamond manufacturers who have recently flocked to Botswana may know him as developer of Phakalane Estates, probably Botswana’s largest and most prestigious residential, commercial and industrial developments.

Historically, Botswana provided up to two-thirds of De Beers’ profits. In all fairness, one can fully understand that the cartel went to any length to protect its interests; though it is hard to approve the methods. In his memoir, Magang gives many examples of his failed diamond industry ambitions. He wanted to bring in Lev Leviev as a major manufacturer in the mid-1990s, but De Beers prevented that. He also wanted a five-percent sales window that would independently market part of the production to verify the prices Botswana was getting from De Beers. He had reasons to believe that the export values were grossly understated. On top of that, there was the 10 percent sales commission to De Beers, which was money, Magang felt that should have gone to benefit Botswana. Even after initially getting support for such measures, they were eventually killed after a short helicopter visit from South Africa to Botswana’s president.

What is most remarkable today is that the people within the Botswana government who had been fighting beneficiation then are the very same people who, a decade later, forced De Beers to support it wholeheartedly. Magang quotes many of the economic arguments then raised by De Beers against the prospects of the success of beneficiation. And, basically, even today, no one in government or at De Beers has come up with convincing counter-arguments to show that their previous position was totally wrong. Now it is merely stressed that downstream verticalization allows one to earn back the losses (or reduced profits) at the manufacturing level.

I strongly believe in the inalienable rights of the Botswana people to determine the destiny of their own mineral wealth. The Botswana people and their government must know what is best for their country. They even have the right to err. One shouldn’t second-guess their decisions.

The Magang memoir, however, demonstrates a 180 degree u-turn on diamond issues throughout the entire country, its economy and its political echelons. After having fought it tooth and nail for 30 years, everyone in Botswana and De Beers are now in a hurry to get the diamond industry off the ground before the country itself runs out of diamonds. It’s far more a matter of political imperatives and national aspirations than pure economics – at least this the impression one gets. The relationship between government and De Beers seems to be one of equals, and if one has the upper hand, it would be the government. The book underscores the contrasts, the enormity of these extreme changes of policies.

Magang’s views on De Beers and beneficiation were already espoused in speeches and articles when he was a parliamentarian and private citizen – long before he became the responsible minister. Everything Magang envisioned as early as the 1970s has now become one of the nation’s highest economic and social priorities.

In his foreword, Magang recalls, “my life has in fact been punctuated by adversity. I have run the gauntlet of trials and tribulations, been tossed from pillar to post, and escaped death by the breath of a hair on more than one occasion. Certain of these calamities have been mere fate. Most have been pure machination, with both friend and foe competing to plot my woes… In short, this story is not necessarily of David Magang. It is a lesson in fortitude, a sermon, by and large, on unyielding resolve, a study in resoluteness of purpose. It is endeavor not so much to parade a certain man’s virtues as to showcase the efficacy, generally, of an imperturbable steely core.”
http://www.diamondimports.com.au/pages.php?pageid=4
Obviously, most events described in his memoir are not diamond-related. Magang’s book is almost like the history of his nation. Magang was born a MoKwena, which means a member of the BaKwena tribe (or a people who dance to the totem of the crocodile). Magang traces his family and tribal roots well back to the 19th century, and in a delightful manner he describes the tribulations of his people over a few hundred years. He recalls that tribal people had found diamonds long before Botswana’s independence, but these findings were always kept secret – lest it would draw unwanted foreigners into their territories.

David Magang is a great African statesman and leader. From a diamond industry perspective, however, he was more like that fellow that stood in front of a tank at Tiananmen Square. Then he was alone. In due time, however, the nation has come to see things his way.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH, 2008, CHAIM EVEN-ZOHAR

Additional Reading :

De Beers & Botswana Beneficiation

The Magic of Perseverance: Memoirs of a retired Botswana politician

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Today in History 1972
Arab terrorists, members of the Black September Group, break into the Olympic Games village in Munich and seize a group of Israeli athletes ashostages. 9 Israelis, 4 terrorists and a German policeman are killed.

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

EGL Int’l Says Falsely Accused by Australia’s JAA


EGL Int’l Says Falsely Accused by Australia’s JAA
(September 3, '08, Sergio Tjong-Alvares)

The Israeli branch of EGL International on Wednesday said it had been falsely accused by the Jewellers Association of Australia (JAA) of circulating certificated diamonds that overstated their color and clarity.

JAA sent an industry alert to all its members in late August citing EGL International as the main laboratory issuing certificates that overstated color and clarity by more than one grading difference and naming EGL International’s Israeli laboratory as the primary source of the overstated certificates.

“There are a number of EGL laboratories located around the world and it would appear that the EGL facility in Israel is the primary source of the over stated certificates,” the JAA said in a statement, noting that all EGL certificates should be treated with the greatest care as they do not appear to list the address of the EGL facility that produced the certificate.

EGL Israel said JAA’s industry alert was “unfair and irresponsible.”

“I would think that, before writing such a provocative letter to your members, you would have had the common decency and courtesy to contact EGL Israel for our response to your allegations,” Guy D. Benhamou, chief executive of EGL International, wrote in a letter addressed to JAA.

He noted that contrary to the JAA’s industry alert, certificates issued by the EGL laboratory in Israel clearly indicated all contact information to enable online verifications.

“There is no such thing as a genuine EGL Israel certificate without an address,” Benhamou said, noting the Web site for clarification.

Despite several attempts JAA was not available for comment. [ This is not true. The CEO Ian Hadassin of the JAA ws overseas in Israel when we contacted him : The Diamond Guru ]

The JAA also said that there were other diamonds accompanied by certificates of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) offered on the Internet that were over graded. It noted that Australia and other countries were used by some dealers to dump GIA graded stones that were over graded in error.

“We would stress that the vast majority of GIA certificated diamonds have the correct gradings and should not give rise for concern,” the JAA said.

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Additional Reading:
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"...when a member sells a diamond, they cannot legally hide behind an inaccurate classification they know to be wrong.If a dispute arises and several dealers testify that the diamond in question is misrepresented, the [ diamond club ] member or diamond vendor may be held civilly liable by an aggrieved party in a court of law." : Inaccurate Diamond Grading Certificates
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JAA Trade Alert- Inaccurate GIA & EGL Diamond Reports

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Diamonds: A Symbol of Value & Death

AWDC to host Sir Branson at 2008 Conference

The theme of the 2008 Conference is “Diamonds, a symbol of value”
By: Diamond World News Service

Keeping its tradition to invite famous personalities outside the diamond trade, to share their success and vision at gala dinners hosted during the Antwerp World Diamond Conferences, AWDC is inviting Sir Richard Branson for the fifth Antwerp Diamond Conference.

Sir Branson has been appreciated for his vision in business, building Virgin as a brand, and creating more than 200 branded companies worldwide across 30 countries. He will deliver an insight into his technique of turning huge challenges into successful business exploits.

The conference entitled “Diamonds, a symbol of value” will host that the gala dinner on November 17 at the Loghidden City in the Antwerp Harbour.

The conferences in the past have featured a wide array of internationally known speakers and participants including Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, Sir Bob Geldof, the Irish pop star, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and South African President Thabo Mbeki.

The 2008 Antwerp Diamond Conference, is to be held on between November 17 and 18 at the Elisabeth hall on the Koningin Astridplein. The conference will welcome all the key-players of the diamond world.

Additional Reading :

Belgium : The Ugly Forgotten Truth

Additional Reading on Past Belgian Atrocities & More:The Crime of the Congo By Arthur Conan Doyle Historical




ILLICIT DIAMONDS FLOW Current: Antwerp during the Blood Diamond (Conflict Diamond) era and still today is the major world rough diamond recipient headquarter



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Today in History 2nd September 1939

Germany invades Poland

Covered by the fearsome Luftwaffe that bombed Polish cities beyond recognition, 58 German divisions cross the border into Poland on September 1, 1939. The Polish army fought bravely to defend the country against the invasion, but were hopelessly outmatched by Germany's modern technology and overwhelming numbers. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler expected appeasement from Britain and France—after all, those nations had given Czechoslovakia away to German conquest in 1938. However, neither Britain nor France was willing to allow Hitler's new violation of Europe's borders, and Germany was presented with an ultimatum: withdraw by September 3 or face war. Hitler refused, and Britain,France,India, Australia, and New Zealand declared war against Germany on September 3. The European chapter of World War II had begun.

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1000 Carats Diamond Missing from Jwaneng?

Debswana Says No Diamonds in Wrong Hands.
Over 1000 carats of diamond are reported to have gone missing at the Jwaneng mine in what has been described as a weird incident.

According to information reaching The Gazette the diamonds have been missing for close to two weeks but no arrests have been made.

Information reaching The Gazette suggests that the matter has been known to the mining community, especially technicians and security officers, for a while but no one is willing to let it out or at least alert the police.

Jwaneng Police Station Commander, Superintendent Bafitlhetse Mothubane, said they are not aware of such an incident. “I have the Diamond and Narcotics Squad people here; if it has reached us they would have told me about it,” he said.

Mothubane said maybe at the time the matter was still internal to the mine.

The Gazette has been informed that the Diamond and Narcotics squad spent the whole investigating the matter in Jwaneng.

Assistant Superintendent Peloentle Morolong of the Diamond and Narcotics Squad said they were not aware of any diamond case in Jwaneng.

Contacted for comment, the spokesperson of the Debswana mine, Ms Esther Kanaimba, said, “as far as we know there are no diamonds that had gone into wrong hands”.

Some employees at the Aquarium Department are understood to have been asked questions about the diamonds by investigating officers.

Some employees at the mine are concerned that the diamonds are not accounted for but the matter is not being taken seriously.
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Debswana refutes reports of stolen diamonds 19 September, 2008
JWANENG - Debswana has refuted media reports of stolen diamonds at the Jwaneng Mine. Instead the company explained that approximately 140 thousand carats were diverted from the plant due to a system failure.
A news release from the company states that a system breakdown diverted the diamonds from an Aquarium Completely Automated Recovery Plant (CARP) process to the final tailings dump.
According to the statement the tailing dump will be treated at a later stage to recover the diamonds.
The company says investigations indicate that the incident occurred as a result of a breakdown of a magnetic machine. Since the tailings dump is within a protected area in the mine, Debswana says the diamonds are therefore secure.
It explains that the magnetic separator machine has been fixed and that the situation is back to normal with no expectation of an occurrence of a similar incident.
The release says all other Aquarium CARP systems have been thoroughly checked and confirmed to be fully functional to prevent a repeat of the incident.
This is the first time such an incident has occurred in the seven years of the existence of the Aquarium CARP process, which the company describes as testimony to the existence of protection and assurance systems in the process.
It says audits over the years have placed the Aquarium CARP process efficiency at greater than 99 percent. BOPA

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