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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was a sparkling 95-37-130. The TSX Venture Exchange gained 13 points to 794 while polished diamond prices were flat. Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF) closed unchanged at 17.5 cents on 173,000 shares. Retail shareholders are increasingly restless with the company's silence.

Jim Greig's Crystal Exploration Inc. (CEI), up one-half cent to 12 cents on 476,000 shares, apparently will not have a shot at becoming the third company to go bankrupt mining diamonds at Jericho, 150 kilometres northwest of Ekati in Nunavut. In mid-December, Crystal said it was working on a possible acquisition of the old mine, which ran for over a year before Tahera Diamond Corp. went bankrupt in 2008. In the early 2010s, Shear Diamond Corp. spent several million dollars in a brief attempt to get the mine running again. Shear went bankrupt as well.

Those failures are probably the reason that Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) rejected Crystal's bid for Jericho. The Nunavut Impact Review Board, in a 41-page report dealing with the federal government's plan to spend $10-million remediating and stabilizing (cleaning up) the Jericho mine site, notes that INAC determined that Crystal was "not currently in a position to provide the necessary security and take on the liability at this time."

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