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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was a bleak 34-73-158. The TSX Venture Exchange fell 11 points to 836 while polished diamond prices slipped slightly. Lukas Lundin and Eira Thomas's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) lost one cent to $1.99 on 857,000 shares, Lucara's first close below $2 since mid-May. The company's Karowe mine has been performing above feasibility projections, thanks to a bounty of large, top-quality gems. Lucara will auction more of those stones in a few weeks, but the market has been erratic of late. Cristiano Melcher's MBAC Fertilizer Corp. (MBC) fell 2.5 cents to 7.5 cents on 7.48 million shares. The company is struggling to reach full production at its Itafos phosphate mine in Brazil. Mr. Melcher says MBAC is building momentum, but he had best start building cash flow: the company's current accounts were $275-million in the red on June 30.

Chuck Fipke's Metalex Ventures Ltd. (MTX) lost one-half cent to five cents on 63,000 shares. Metalex is still waiting for permission from the Ontario government to build a winter road from the Victor diamond mine to U2, a big kimberlite about 60 kilometres to the west, where it wants to conduct a 10,000-tonne bulk sample. (Metalex has been waiting over two years for the permits. Metalex blamed the long delay for the loss of its optionee, Dundee Corp. (DC.A: $16.18), which walked away from an option that would have allowed it to earn a 51-per-cent interest through an investment of $51-million. Perhaps it was the delay, and perhaps Dundee used the time to rethink its option arrangement in light of the previous results from U2.

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