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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was a negative 44-51-156. The TSX Venture Exchange fell fractionally to 679 while polished diamond prices fell 0.5 per cent. Robert Gannicott's Dominion Diamond Corp. (DDC), down another 31 cents to $18.13 on 753,000 shares, is well off its May high of $24.60. The abrupt slide began in mid-June when Dominion's first quarter report showed higher margins and lower profits through the winter. Cristiano Melcher's MBAC Fertilizer Corp. (MBC) gained one-half cent to 10 cents on 1.05 million shares. MBAC, one cent in late February and 16.5 cents in mid-March, has since stabilized as investors wait to see if Mr. Melcher can fix the company's $265-million working capital deficiency.

James Campbell's Rockwell Diamonds Inc. (RDI), down one-half cent to 21.5 cents on 7,000 shares, has closed its acquisition of the Remhoogte/Holsloot diamond project on the Middle Orange River in South Africa. "Rockwell turns to the future" with its new project, beams Mr. Campbell, CEO, probably because the company's past has been glum. (He described the company's most recent quarter as "very challenging," although the results were hard to distinguish from most of Rockwell's other quarters over the past decade.) Mr. Campbell says Rockwell spent its latest quarter managing the closure of some operations. Mining at Saxendrift has approached the end of its economic life while "funding constraints" limited capacity at NJK. He had a more cheerful message just a year ago, when he said Rockwell was continuing to make progress toward its objective of increasing production volumes to 500,000 cubic metres of gravels per month.

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