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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a weak 46-64-138. The TSX Venture Exchange fell two points to 697 while polished diamond prices fell 2 per cent. Ken MacNeill and George Read's Shore Gold Inc. (SGF) had a good day, gaining three cents to 27 cents on 738,000 shares. Shore is getting set to start a $6-million drill program on Orion South, a key part of its proposed $2.1-billion diamond mine in central Saskatchewan. Marc LeVier's Great Western Minerals Group Ltd. (GWG) closed unchanged at one-half cent on 274,000 shares. The company failed to make a $4.5-million interest payment earlier this month and it has been unable to negotiate a restructuring of its debt as yet. Mr. LeVier "continues to explore alternatives."

Chuck Fipke and Chad Ulansky's Metalex Ventures Ltd. (MTX), unchanged at 10 cents on 13,000 shares, has received all the permits needed for its planned bulk sample of the U2 kimberlite, 60 kilometres west of the Victor diamond mine in Northern Ontario. These are the permits the company applied for three years ago, applications that had been plastered with red tape since then. The Ontario government's insistence that Metalex talk to the local Indians was a part of the delay. (Local is a fuzzy concept when dealing with aboriginal issues: the Attawapiskat Indians live 160 kilometres east of U2, the Marten Falls Indians reside 150 kilometres south-southwest.) The Ontario bureaucrats also dithered about a comment from an environmental group that suggested a full-blown assessment would be needed. The government spent a full year deciding that the environmental assessment for the project was indeed adequate.

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