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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a positive 98-85-127 as the TSX Venture Exchange added one point to 532. Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD) closed unchanged at 25 cents on 133,000 shares. The company's stock has bounced off its 31-year low of 19.5 cents, set in late October, but it closed today at its oh-my-God-we're-going-bankrupt low of 25 cents, set deep in the bowels of the panic accompanying the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown.

Mr. Desmond, the company's largest shareholder for the past three decades, rode to the rescue in 2020, buying $50-million (U.S.) of Mountain Province's temporarily unsellable rough diamonds and providing the company with much-needed loans to tide it over -- all for lucrative fees, of course. The interventions saved the day and by 2022, Mountain Province's fortunes were looking markedly better, if not bright. Unfortunately, rough diamond prices are down about 26 per cent from their record highs of early 2022, and prices have now flattened only because many buyers and sellers are on the sidelines.

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