London’s diamond trade may not be forever

Richard Orange says London’s traditional dominance of global dealing in uncut stones is under threat from new players based in India, China and Dubai

‘How does it feel to hold $9 million in the palm of your hand?’ One of the world’s leading diamond buyers, Rajiv Mehta, watches intently for my reaction to this question: the sachet of dull glassy pebbles I am gently weighing, if I could somehow get them out of this building and into the hands of some Antwerp middleman, would buy me one of London’s most prestigious addresses, my own island in the Bahamas, or a country-sized swath of the Argentinean pampas.

Slim chance: the building is one of the most secure in London and we are in one of its most secure rooms — a ‘sight room’, where buyers examine diamonds. The London headquarters of the Diamond Trading Company, in Charterhouse Street near Hatton Garden where the jewellery trade is centred, is part 1970s office block, part modern fortress. There’s no company logo outside, no reference to diamonds or DTC — or De Beers which owns DTC, or Anglo American which in turns owns 45 per cent of De Beers. The only clue to its purpose, apart from the thickness of its walls, is the occasional arrival of an armoured van at its solid metal gates.

In front of Mehta, who is chief executive of Dimexon, a big player in the diamond cutting business, lie two open safe boxes overflowing with close to $20 million worth of uncut stones, sorted by DTC into bags of different sizes, from a few nuggets the size of quails’ eggs to thousands of tiny, lower-quality diamonds, each barely bigger than a grain of sand. This is the ‘London Mix’, in which De Beers’ diamonds, after a basic sort close to its mines in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania, are thoroughly sifted in the back rooms of this building into 12,000 categories based on size and quality, rather than geography.