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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a so-so 64-111-135 as the TSX Venture Exchange lost two points to 529. Ewan Mason's Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM) added one-half cent to 7.5 cents on 55,000 shares. Yes, November is galloping down the home stretch and the long-awaited and purportedly imminent news of a deal with Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc. (RTEC) appears to have pulled up lame again. Star Diamond expects the deal will end its six-year-long diamond misadventure with RTEC at the once busy but now inactive FalCon joint venture in central Saskatchewan.

RTEC arrived with much fanfare in mid-2017, spending with sufficient ferocity that it declared its four-stage, seven-year earn-in deal completed late in 2019. Not so fast, Star Diamond grumped, siccing its lawyers on RTEC and thereby halting a proposed $100-million plan for 2018 -- and for 2019, as it turned out. By the time the two sides reached a compromise late that year -- a deal that gave RTEC a 75-per-cent interest in the project, but also gave Star Diamond longer to pay its share -- RTEC's big-spending ways triggered a blip on the company's head office radar.

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