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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Friday was a buoyant 63-50-152. The TSX Venture Exchange jumped 18 points to 810 while polished diamond prices crept upward. Patrick Evans's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPV) fell 13 cents to $5.20 on 77,000 shares. Mountain Province, which needs over $500-million for its share of construction costs at Gahcho Kue, recently raised $100-million at $5. Mr. Evans, who usually completes big placements with ease, will need similar success with a big loan. He hopes to settle the details of a $370-million term loan by the end of the year. Cristiano Melcher's MBAC Fertilizer Corp. (MBC) gained one cent to seven cents on 2.33 million shares. The company has been struggling to get its Itafos mine in Brazil running at capacity and has arranged a $1.6-million loan to tide it over.

Leni Keough's Olivut Resources Ltd. (OLV), unchanged at 15.5 cents on 26,000 shares, has raised $330,000 by selling 420,000 flow-through shares at 25 cents and 1.13 million regular shares at 20 cents. Ms. Keough, president and CEO, bought 220,000 while her main backer, stock promoter Pierre Lassonde, bought 250,000, his first buy in three years. The cash is for exploration and "general corporate purposes." (Exploration seems a prime corporate purpose, but Olivut has done little of it in the past few years.) The company regularly drilled its HOAM diamond prospect, south of Great Bear Lake and north of Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories, discovering several new kimberlites in the late 2000s. Ms. Keough, one of Canada's first diamond geologists, says Olivut has been "very successful in identifying kimberlite occurrences" at HOAM and "some of the kimberlites are microdiamond bearing." (In this case, "some" is a Howe Street synonym for "few," as most were barren and the rest held just a smattering of tiny stones.) Olivut still has plenty of targets but it spent the past two years seeking new geophysical anomalies. Drilling is promotable, geophysics is not, but drilling is expensive in Canada's North.

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