De Beers and its Stockpile

The more and more I read about the inter workings of the De Beers Group, the more and more I am appalled by them. I discussed previously that De Beers is the largest buyer and seller in the world of diamonds, and controls how many stones make it to the market so they can control prices. According to Blood Diamonds, around 2000 De Beers had a stockpile of diamonds procured from all over the world, including warring regions in Africa, which totaled about $4 billion. Of course this hefty sum in actuality is a lot less than that because if the company ever decided to sell all of these diamonds, the price for rough stones would fall dramatically. Now taking into account this large amount of stones that was in the possession of De Beers since before 2000, there is no possible way that every single stone is conflict free. Granted in 2000 De Beers stopped its open market buying, but that means for a good ten years De Beers did business in a market with no restrictions on how stones were acquired. I posted a while back about a 1996 report that De Beers put out saying that their purchases reached “record highs” because of the production in Angola. Well that right there proves that undoubtedly somewhere in the $4 billion stockpile of diamonds, there are bound to be conflict stones. So not only is the company controlling the market price of diamonds, but who knows if the stones that they do put out on the market are really clean. Some food for thought perhaps. DON”T BUY FROM DE BEERS!