'Nobody alive has ever seen something like this': Inside the plan to sell the biggest gems on Earth

financialpost.com:

The morning of Aug. 19 started off much like any other at Lucara Diamond Corp.’s Karowe mine in Botswana, a roughly 270-metre deep open pit on the edge of the Kalahari desert that operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

But on that day, a 2,492-carat diamond — believed to be the second largest ever held by a human — completed a journey from hundreds of kilometres inside the Earth’s mantle up to the planet’s surface.

After billions of years of travel, its fate upon arrival fell into the hands of William Lamb, chief executive of Lucara, whose sector has been going through its own upheaval amid a collapse in the price of diamonds in recent years.

Lamb, who is based half a world away from Botswana in Vancouver where Lucara is headquartered, skips over the question of how much the stone may be worth in dollars. Instead, he’s contemplating its value in a larger sense.

With all the notoriety and intrigue the stone is generating around the world, he sees an opportunity to reframe the narrative about diamond mining into something positive instead of an environmental and social disaster that’s lately been shunned by both investors and customers.

“There’s nobody alive who has ever seen something like this,” he said about the 2,492-carat stone. “I had this argument with a board member yesterday: this diamond is so significant and people are trying to dumb it down to what’s it worth.”

The value may be moot for the moment because, in Lamb’s view, diamond prices will remain in a “fairly depressed state” for at least six to nine months. That could be one reason why Lucara is still a penny stock, trading at 47 cents a share, though it’s up 18 per cent since the beginning of the year.

This isn’t even Lucara’s first remarkable discovery.