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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Wednesday was a ho-hum 90-88-132 as the TSX Venture Exchange fell three points to 537. Ewan Mason's Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM) closed unchanged at 7.5 cents on 160,000 shares. Investors are still awaiting the formal transfer of the 75-per-cent interest in the Fort a la Corne diamond project from Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc. (RTEC) to Star. The deal is done, save for the bureaucrats giving the transfer the official nod, and the market is eager for news about how Star Diamond will entice investors to back its plan to build a $2-billion mine on its own as quickly as possible.

Most of the attention will be directed at Star's journey back to feasibility. The $200-million trip that RTEC ultimately aborted is not under consideration by cash-strapped Star, which if it is pondering multiple avenues, they would be described as cheap, cheaper and cheapest. All options apparently have George Read, the company's senior vice-president of corporate development, comparing the diamonds recovered from the Star pipe with the much smaller parcel recovered from Orion South to avoid a major and costly bulk sample of the latter pipe. (RTEC had planned and laid the groundwork for a 20-hole test using the Bauer trench cutter -- work that would have cost many millions of dollars.)

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