Customs Moves to Bharat Diamond Bourse; GJEPC to Follow In 3 Weeks

The new Bharat Diamond Bourse complex will be home of Mumbai's diamond industry

(IDEX Online News) - The gem and jewelry unit of India’s customs, today moved the last of its operations from the Diamond Plaza building in the downtown Opera House area of Mumbai to its offices in the Bharat Diamond Bourse (BDB), located in the Bandra Kurla Complex in the city’s western suburbs.

Customs authorities issued a notice formally denotifying the Opera House premises and announcing that as of today, all customs formalities would be processed at BDB. Some Customs import and export operations had begun from the BDB in October last year, immediately after the complex was formally inaugurated.

The GJEPC’s Kimberley Process (KP) division had shifted all its operations to the BDB, forcing diamond dealers to process their KP paperwork through the BDB facility all this while.

The Exhibitions Division of the GJEPC, which organizes the IIJS shows, has been operating from the BDB for sometime now. As of next week, the Promotion, Marketing & Business Development (PMBD) division of the GJEPC will also move to the BDB. The last of the GJEPC’s secretariat is slated to make the move by the first week of February. The GJEPC’s lease of its Diamond Plaza offices expires on February 12 and the trade body has already notified its landlord that the lease will not be renewed.

These moves are seen as being crucial toward expediting the entire diamond industry’s move to the BDB. Already, interior work in as many as 100 offices in the BDB is well advanced and the bourse will start levying maintenance payments from office-owners shortly. All this is expected to catalyze the move to the BDB. Many diamond firms have begun negotiating with banks, who hold their Opera House offices as collateral, to release these for sale, while their BDB offices are entered as collateral instead. Real estate values in the BDB have also shot up, another indicator that the entire industry’s move is imminent.

Russell Mehta, chief operations officer of Rosy Blue, thinks the full move by the industry will probably take place around April, a traditionally slow month for the industry. According to him, most interior work, including that of Rosy Blue’s offices, will have been completed by then. He noted, however, that a practical way for the move to take place would be for the country’s top 30 or so diamond firms to meet and decide on a date to move their offices. That way, the entire industry would be assured of a substantial chunk of business actually taking place at the BDB and be emboldened to make the move.