De Beers And Namibia Still In Diamond Sales Agreement Talks

(IDEX Online News) – Namibia and De Beers are still engaged in talks for the renewal of the sides' diamond sales agreement, with Namibia aiming to reach a deal that would allow it to sell a proportion of the stones separately.

“We are still negotiating; we hope an agreement would be reached but we don’t know when,” Mines Ministry Commissioner for Diamond Affairs Kennedy Hamutenya, who also leads the negotiating team, told Bloomberg News. “We can’t say we want to be finished by this specific period as that depends on how the issues are dealt with.”

The Namibian government and De Beers, who jointly own Namdeb Diamond Corp., are working on a sales deal to replace their previous 2007 agreement under which De Beers sold production via the Diamond Trading Company until the end of 2013. That agreement was extended to the end of June as sales continued.

Namibia is the world’s biggest producer of marine mined diamonds. Mines Minister Isak Katali said in July that the country wants to sell some of the stones separately from De Beers, similar to the agreement signed by De Beers and Botswana in 2010.

“When we started these negotiations, there was never a shelf life, it’s unhelpful to put timelines and we can’t comment until the process is concluded,” Daniel Kali, De Beers Namibia country manager, told Bloomberg.

Namdeb’s diamond output climbed 6 percent on the year to 1.76 million carats in 2013; around two-thirds came from its marine mining operations.

“If we don’t agree, we will keep on talking until we have a win-win agreement,” Hamutenya said, without disclosing when a deal would likely be reached.