Golf-ball Sized Diamond Up for Auction
In the market for a big diamond? I mean a really big diamond? Up for bid now in Antwerp: the 603-carat Lesotho Promise, the largest rough diamond found since the 777 carat Millennium Star in 1993. Of course both of those are puny compared to the 3,106 carats of the Cullinan, the long-time record holder found in 1905 in South Africa. The Letseng mine, which produced the gem on August 22, is jointly owned by the Gem Diamond Mining Company of Africa and the Lesotho government. According to its owners the rough is D-color. Clarity? Far from flawless, judging from the BBC’s photos of the elongated, roughly golf-ball-sized rough. The winning bid will be announced next week. “A figure of around $10 million is something that we are expecting it to achieve as the minimum, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Clifford Elphick, chief executive of the Gem Diamond Company, told iAfrica. “It does have a couple of glitches, which are really cracks in it, and so unfortunately, it won’t polish into a single stone …. it will polish into a number of stones, probably an 80 carat being the biggest.”