Lucara Diamonds failed to sell “Lesedi La Rona”, the biggest diamond found in more than a century, at Sotheby’s last May, but now it’s mulling another round. In an interview Friday (August 5) with Bloomberg TV Canada quoted by Gem konnect, Lucara’s CEO William Lamb said: “We’re not discounting going back to the auction process in some form in the future”.
“Was there an investor class that would acquire the stone in its rough form as a collector’s item?” Lamb said. “That’s the biggest problem for a rough diamond – most people only value it for its intrinsic value, what you can polish out of it, what you can sell the polished one for. We were hoping that there would be an investor who would want to own it for its historical significance”.
However, the company learned “quite early on in the process that they hate the auction,” Lamb said. “The lesson is learned, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t go back” to the auction block, he concluded.
The tennis ball sized diamond was discovered by Lucara at their Karowe mine in Botswana in November 2015 and is the largest gem-quality rough diamond to have been discovered in over a century, and the largest gem-quality diamond in existence today.
