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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a lacklustre 45-51-150 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell fractionally to 690. Polished diamond prices, flat today, are off 3.5 per cent over the past two months and down nearly 14 per cent over the past four years. Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF), one of several diamond explorers banking on rough prices moving sharply higher, fell one cent to 22 cents on 419,000 shares. Shore has just started a large diameter drilling program on the periphery of Orion South, one of two pipes at its Star-Orion South project in central Saskatchewan. The $6-million program is needed to upgrade six million carats from inferred to indicated, which would allow the company to include them in a revised feasibility study. Shore also hopes the result will allow it to change the start of its mine from Star to Orion South, which it hopes will eliminate a bit of the projected $2-billion cost of the mine. Cristiano Melcher's MBAC Fertilizer Corp. (MBC) fell one-half cent to 10 cents on 2.64 million shares. MBAC, $3.94 in early 2013 and just one cent this spring, urgently needs to refinance the debt it incurred building its Itafos mine in Brazil.

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