The last thing I want to do is promote synthetic diamond czar Jatin Mehta’s synthetic diamond operations, IIa Technologies in Singapore, or his Pure Grown Diamonds (formerly Gemesis) operations in New York. But when I saw what appear to be his fingerprints on an ambitious, well-financed (of course), graphically well-executed new internet platform called “Better Diamond Initiative” (BDI), I believed, for one fleeting moment, that something good and worthy of reporting may be in the making.

The BDI Mission Statement
The platform’s mission statement stresses “the need for fresh, young opinions about today’s customer and today’s diamond market. We intend to have an open discussion about what we as consumers want and what we as industry members need to do to deliver them.”

Then the statement gets to the platform’s essence: “BDI also aims at creating a global consciousness in opposition to the countless atrocities being done against nature, mankind and mother earth. Our mission is to create awareness relating to diamond related conflicts, human rights and sustainable economic development. We envision a future where diamonds do not claim any lives and offer an opportunity of economic development for everyone so that our children can wake up to a world, which has a healthy environment and fair opportunity for everyone.” [Emphasis added.]

Now, if these aspirations were written on the website of Global Witness (GW) or Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), I would wholly support these words; but when they seem to come from a synthetics producer, the mission becomes a strategy to sell more products.

Read this same paragraph again in the context of a public relations strategy to promote open discussions, which will ultimately lead consumers away from natural diamonds and to synthetics, or lab-grown diamonds. Many of the blog twitter messages are clearly planted to advance synthetic sales.

Though it is supposedly unrelated to IIa Technologies, this website clearly states that it is “supported” – however, it is not revealed by whom. When we discovered that BDI is a registered trademark owned by IIa Technologies, we got our answer.

DIB discovered that the synthetic producer has already registered five trademarks of a range of slogans in combination with its own logo. Each of them are exceptionally clever and appealing, which isn’t surprising as a company that has money to spend gets the best image creators money can buy.

Just pause a second and look at each of the logos. One logo has as its trademarked slogan: “Better Diamond Initiative,” which comes with a whole series of reserved domain names, Twitter names, Facebook pages, etc. We checked the other logos’ slogans, and in at least one other, we found a domain name already reserved.

Amazingly, as soon as questions were asked about the website, the registration details were changed to “private.” Why, at this point in time, the association between company slogan and domain-name ownership should be hidden totally escapes us. 

Slogan Analysis
Some of these slogans are ingenious. Just ponder this: If IIa Tech diamonds “stand for life,” what do other diamonds represent? Actually, I believe this slogan may be next in line for public release, as the domain name “westandforlife.com” is already in place.

The slogan “Diamonds Grown on Diamonds” is a clever play on words. The substrate on which the crystal grows is a diamond as well. Moreover, in advanced CVD-growing techniques, one can grow (increase the height) of a synthetic diamond by growing another on its top. It does not leave traces.

The slogan “Unlocking Nature” might make one think that the diamond is natural, especially as it comes directly after the company name. If De Beers or any other producer added the same words to its corporate name, no one would doubt what it implies. This slogan will make many natural diamond promoters jump.

Where I think IIa Tech may really have crossed the line, though, is with its slogan “Grown Diamonds, Nature’s Purest.” This makes one think that these diamonds are really the best nature can offer.

BDI’s Social Wall…
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the BDI comes awfully close to the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI). Vive la difference – but it cannot be a coincidence. The DDI, chaired by Ian Smillie, someone who has dedicated his entire life to improving the plight of people in Africa, is associated with tremendously worthy work. How would the BDI match this? With considerable anticipation, I turned to the “social wall” of the BDI website and the first thing that caught my eye was a huge, almost screen-width headline shouting: “An Interesting Post which Explains why Diamonds Cut in Israel are Blood Diamonds.” This is followed by an image that screams: “GAZA in Our Hearts. Allah With You.” The words Better Diamond Initiative appear prominently above the headline.

The article selection is probably done by Vyom Shah, who claims to be the promoter and owner of this supported platform. As we mentioned below in 'About Us', his name was only added to the website in the last few days after journalistic sleuthing was well under way. Therefore, BDI was a website without any owners.

One Website Too Many?
The Federal Trade Commission, CIBJO, many conventional trade conventions and widely accepted industry practices, set clear rules on the marketing of man-made diamonds. A few years ago, the highly respected Royal Asscher Company in the Netherlands, launched CVD man-made diamonds under a corporate logo of “Mined Diamonds” and, we understand, there is also somewhere a “NuMined Diamonds” brand. The disclosure of the man-made origins of these diamonds is made abundantly clear – but the name suggests that these diamonds were mined nevertheless.

IIa Technologies must have taken a cue from such precedents. The protected and registered trademarks will probably allow the marketing of these diamonds in virtually all jurisdictions – if not everywhere. Man-made diamonds will have a great future – their marketing is a challenge, not made easy by the natural mining companies. Linking these man-made diamonds to Social Walls and websites that raise doubts in the minds of consumers as to the social and other values of natural diamonds will, in the end, do more harm than good to the diamond product. Everybody loses. If IIa Technologies is committed to the Better Diamond Initiative slogan, it might conclude that they have one website too many.

The Governance of Pure Grown Diamonds
For reasons best known to Jatin Mehta himself, he appears to run his global empire through proxies. The Pure Grown Diamond business in New York is actively promoted as a hands-on project by Su-Raj Mehta, the son of Jatin and Sonia Mehta. A check on the Delaware company’s registration (still under the name Gemesis Inc.) shows Lisa Bissell as President of Pure Grown Diamonds and Singapore’s Tan Chee Eng as the company’s director. There is a Michael Tan on the Board of Directors of IIa Technologies, though that is an entirely different person from Pure Grown Diamond’s Tan Chee Eng. Based on company filings (dated July 7, 2014) there is no director from IIa Technologies in Singapore represented on the board of Pure Grown Diamonds in New York.

The only Tan Chee Eng in Singapore with whom we are familiar is a senior engineer at D’Crypt Pte Ltd., one of the more sophisticated software, firmware and network application development companies that is “working closely with customers to ensure solutions fit their unique and individual needs, delivering fully secure yet convenient modules, products and systems.” We have not (yet) established any relationship between Eng and IIa Tech, but someone going by the name of  Tan Chee Eng is definitely a director of the company’s U.S. operations.

Phronesis Strategies: The "Declared Owner" of the Website
DIB sent a few e-mails with questions to Vyom Shah – which remain unanswered. A correspondence with another journalist apparently ended with Shah’s lamenting to him that “it seems as though the facts I have given you are not what you want to hear and so we should leave it at that.” So much for encouraging “open discussion” as Shah's website said he was committed to.

We contacted Vyom Shah because India’s company registration records don’t show that there exists a Phronesis Strategies. At least not as a formally incorporated company, something that somehow didn’t come as a surprise. But at the end of the day, it is quite common for a few individuals selling their personal services under a common brand name. We think that this is probably the case. Nowadays, you don’t need more than a website to have a business.

The Club of Lancaster University Friends
Shah is just a few years out of Lancaster University School of Business Management; he graduated in the class of 2011. If you look at the Phronesis Strategies team, you would think they have picked the wrong name. They should have called themselves the Lancaster Friends. Vyom Shah, Sibasish Sinha, Shameer Pirani, who are all listed as Phronesis Strategies partner consultants, each graduated around the same time from Lancaster University. The company website also lists an external adviser, Patrick Kück. No surprises. He also graduated from the same Lancaster University business school.

Actually, looking at pictures, the Phronesies seem quite amicable. Vyom Shah got married in Nagpur, India, just two years ago. I am not sure whether there were diamonds at the wedding ceremony – one cannot detect if there were any from the picture – but given Shah's website’s implied view on natural diamonds, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

And now comes the strange part. Searching the social websites of the Lancaster Friends, Shah’s partners themselves don’t mention any affiliation with Phronesis Strategies. Actually, partner Sibasish Sinha seems to be Business Development Manager at India’s Bengalore branch of Nasdaq-listed Cognizant Technology Solutions. Another partner, Mayank Umbarkar works at Wipro. The last member of the team, Shameer Pirani, also from the class of 2011, looked for business opportunities (which also brought him to Uganda a few times.) Recently, he started his pharmaceutical marketing company in India with the aim of marketing generic medicines under his own brand name to developing and under-developed countries, including India.

Why these partners all smilingly appear on the Phronesis Strategies website but are not identifying themselves elsewhere as being affiliated with this company is beyond my comprehension. Or maybe not. As Vyom Shah has demonstrated, they are good at creating brand identities on websites – and very good in quickly removing any evidence on websites that links BDI to IIa Technologies. Shah knows best why he wants that disassociation. He didn’t tell me, though, that’s for sure.

About Us?
Until a few days ago before original publication of this article, the BDI website didn’t have an “About Us” section on its home page. This addition was made after considerable investigative sleuthing by JCK’s Rob Bates, which ultimately led to someone coming forward to claim ownership. The BDI is now presented as the brainchild of Vyom Shah, the Founder & Managing Consultant of Phronesis Strategies from Nagpur, India.

For the record, IIa Tech’s press liaison denies (in an e-mail to Rob) having anything to do with BDI and its website betterdiamondinitiative.org. However, when Rob started to ask Vyom Shah questions about the website’s server, its registration manager Manish Raj, the existence of common I.P. addresses among a variety of IIa Tech “reserved” websites, including BDI’s website, something miraculous happened: on October 22, several of the IIa Tech domain name registrations suddenly changed to “private” – with no traces.

[Interestingly, the betterdiamondinititiative.co.in domain was cancelled altogether; the one with the "org" prefix remained - and the registration manager went "private".] This tells a lot "about us"...