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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a weak 65-108-137 as the TSX Venture Exchange lost seven points to 530. Ewan Mason's Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM) closed unchanged at 9.5 cents on 315,000 shares.

Two weeks ago, Star Diamond cheered the return of the 75-per-cent interest in the Fort a la Corne diamond project in central Saskatchewan, thanks to a deal with Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc. (RTEC). Work will not start anew, at least not in a big way, until the arrangement closes in a month or two, but Mr. Mason, chairman and interim chief executive officer, and George Read, his executive vice-president of corporate development, are already applauding plans to take the Star and Orion South kimberlites back to feasibility. Meanwhile, there is still uncertainty about where a Fort a la Corne mine might start.

While Mr. Mason and Mr. Read spent all but the last 40 seconds or so of a 45-minute conference call with investors applauding the virtues of Orion South and Star, they dangled a new come-on to investors in their last burst of good cheer: "We haven't even dusted the top of stuff like Orion North," Mr. Mason enthused, noting that was where Rio Tinto wanted to start mining the project. Orion North, Mr. Mason said, has "much shallower overburden" to contend with and "much, much higher Type IIa [diamond] content" to potentially boost the diamond values.

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