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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a ho-hum 60-64-133. The TSX Venture Exchange fell one point to 762 while polished diamond prices edged lower. Lukas Lundin's Lucara Diamond Corp. (LUC) gained five cents to $2.78 on 455,000 shares. Lucara, which traded as high as $4.39 last summer, has been zigzagging lower since then in the absence of great news from the company's Karowe mine in Botswana. Karowe has been its usual productive self, but there have not been any huge diamonds recovered since the fall of 2015.

Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF), unchanged at 33 cents on 455,000 shares, has revealed some extra details about its option arrangement with Rio Tinto PLC. Late in June, Shore acquired the 31 per cent of the Fort a la Corne joint venture that it did not already own from Newmont Mining Corp. (NEM: $32.68 (U.S.)), in exchange for 53.8 million shares of Shore and warrants to buy another 1.1 million shares at 34.9 cents per share. The transaction valued the Fort a la Corne venture at approximately $60-million, a far cry from the deal 11 years ago in which Newmont paid Shore $170.4-million in cash for what was then a 40-per-cent interest in the joint venture property. The sale to Newmont had valued the Fort a la Corne project at a hefty $425-million.

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