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Burgundy Diamond Mines is expected to complete the $136m purchase of the Ekati mine, in Canada, by the end of this month and says it will advance plans for first-of-its-kind underwater crawler. The Australia-based end-to-end diamond company expects to “significantly”...

When Botswana’s President demands a larger share of the profits, Anglo American’s management should consider issuing a profit warning. “If we don’t reach a win-win situation, each side will have to pack up and go home,” President Masisi said last Sunday in his home village of Moshupa (African News, 13 February 2023). His public demand for a fairer share of the profits from De Beers finally brings into the open a claim that has, until now, remained behind the closed doors of negotiating rooms.

Before trying to understand the potential operational scenarios ahead of us, let’s try first to answer a challenging but essential question that impacts these negotiations. Is President Masisi’s demand fair and reasonable, or is it just another African president following in the footsteps of predecessors who released the colonialist genie from the bottle? When President Mugabe of Zimbabwe redistributed white farmlands back in the year 2000, he brought only chaos and devastation to his country. Very few saw fairness and justice in the aggressive takeover of helpless white farmers. But this is Botswana, one of the most stable African countries, with a thriving democracy and a long-term reputation for keeping up with contractual obligations. We are not talking about farmlands either, but about the fate of the majority of the 34 per cent of the world’s diamond production sold by De Beers (Bain’s Report 2022). We are talking about the fate of every third stone that one sees through the thick armored glass of jewelry shops around the world.

Date: 30 April, 2023 | By Erez Rivlin. (IDEX Online) - A Swiss company claims it has developed technology that chemically profiles any diamond so it can identify the country - and even the specific mine - of origin. Spacecode says it analyzes diamonds at a molecular...

Date: 08 Dec, 2022 | By Erez Rivlin.  Picture : De Beers Group. Anglo American owns 85% of De Beers and Botswana owns the remaining 15%. It is the seventh largest mining company in the world and in 2021 it made a staggering profit (EBIDTA) of $20.6 billion (more than...

Date: 26 May, 2022 | By Erez Jacob Rivlin.  Picture : De Beers Group. The fog of the Russian-Ukrainian war has hidden a major diamond battle that rages thousands of miles south-west to the Russian war zone. The President of Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi, speaking at a...

Date: 24 Feb, 2022 | By Erez Jacob Rivlin.  Picture : De Beers Group. OPINION Erez Jacob Rivlin is a diamond market analyst and mining consultant focusing on evaluations, acquisitions and operations of diamond mines. erezrivlin@yahoo.com Hubert de Munck is financial...