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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Tuesday was a disappointing 71-86-153 as the TSX Venture Exchange slid 11 points to 777. Ken Johnson's Lipari Mining Ltd. (LML) dipped one cent to 30 cents on 11,000 shares on Monday and was untraded today. The company, which went public after a two-year slugfest battling bureaucratic paperwork, has been sinking slowly from the 47.5 cents at which it first traded a board lot in early May. Not only does its chart slope downward like a roof on a winter chalet, it also comes complete with icicles dangling from its rake -- lower-price trades occurring on days that Lipari threatens to trade with any appreciable volume.

The company nevertheless is one of Canada's -- well, Brazil's, to be more accurate -- few active diamond companies. On Monday, Mr. Johnson, president and chief executive officer, applauded Lipari's second quarter production at Brauna, the company's little kimberlite mine in Brazil. Mining went well at the 2,000-tonne-per-day operation, with just shy of 180,000 tonnes of kimberlite mined and processed during the quarter, from which Lipari culled 23,021 carats. That was off slightly from the previous quarter, the result of a slightly lower grade -- about 12.9 carats per hundred tonnes compared with 14.6 carats per hundred tonnes in the first quarter.

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