“I’ll be glad to expand my trade ties with Israeli diamond merchants,” Israel’s largest diamond exporter Lev Leviev said, following reports that the Israel Diamond Exchange board of directors had decided to open urgent negotiations with independent raw diamond sources. Leviev owns diamond-mining rights in Africa and Russia.
The diamond merchants have decided to increase the number of their sites from independent sources, in order to reduce their dependency on the De Beers diamond syndicate.
Senior sources close to Leviev told “Globes”, “Leviev already supplies the same number or more sites (allocations) to diamond merchants in Israel than they receive from De Beers.”
The sources added that Leviev supplies about 10 sites in Israel, each of which amounts to $100 million, making a total of $1 billion in raw diamonds, which is about the same amount imported from De Beers.
Diamond industry sources who oppose Israel Diamond Exchange president Shmuel Schnitzer said that Schnitzer had done nothing in the matter to date, and was only taking action now because De Beers had deprived him of his personal set. Schnitzer said in response that the Diamond Exchange board’s decision to reduce dependency on the syndicate had no connection to the loss of his set.
Israeli diamond merchants receive 20% of De Beers’s supply of raw diamonds, amounting to $1 billion a year. Senior diamond merchant sources said Leviev had recently increased his supply of raw diamonds to Israel.
The diamond merchants hope that the turn to independent sources, such as Leviev, will increase raw diamond imports to Israel, at much lower prices than imports through intermediaries. The diamond merchants require intermediary services because of the low quotas assigned to them by the syndicate.
Published by Globes [online] -l www.globes.co.il - on July 24, 2003