Angola’s national diamond company, Sodiam has announced that they will offer $20m of rough in a two-week online tender.
The company in June raised over $56.6m in its third and largest rough auction. The amount results specifically from the tender for special diamonds from the Uari, Lulo, Catoca and Luele mines, whose bid evaluation sessions, which were submitted electronically, took place between the 9th and 23rd June. In addition to the diversified set of special stones, a batch of “run-of-mine” composition (raw ore) varied in all sizes of the production of kimberlite Luele in the Luaxe region was also on sale.
Productions
This latest tender will include six exceptional single stones from its Lulo mine, two of them pinks. There will also be several baskets of single stones from Catoca, the mine accused by the Democratic Republic of Congo of poisoning rivers with a tailings leak, killing 12 people. Operators Catoca Mining Company admit there was a leak but insist it was not toxic.
Sodiam, the company that has been marketing Angola’s diamonds since 1999, says viewings will take place at its Luanda offices. The productions sold to date are the result of twelve productions, between Kimberly and alluvial, and cover the entire spectrum of qualities in terms of sizes, models, purities and colors.
Angola exported over 7.7m rough carats in 2020 for a total value of just over $1bn, making it the world’s third largest rough diamond producer by value. In 2018 Angola introduced trading reforms that allowed 120 companies to buy stock previously available to just eight “preferential customers”.
