Posted on 07/13/2004 3:18:43 PM PDT by swilhelm73
NEW YORK (Reuters) - De Beers, the world's top diamond producer, will plead guilty in a U.S. court to a 10-year-old price-fixing charge, opening the way for it to resume business in America after nearly 60 years, a court official said on Monday.
The return of the venerable South African company is likely to spark a battle in the luxury goods market when it opens a store on Fifth Avenue this year to rival Tiffany and Co. Inc. (TIF), as well as Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, both owned by Swiss luxury goods group Richemont-.
According to Keith Mayton, a law clerk at the federal court for the Southern District of Ohio in Columbus, De Beers will plead guilty to a single count of price-fixing on Tuesday in front of U.S. District Court Judge George Smith.
It will pay a fine of up to $10 million in the 1994 grand jury indictment, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.moneycentral.msn.com ...
$10 million fine seems like a slap on the wrist considering the profits it must of extracted from its monopoly control over diamonds. Probably $10 billion would of been a more fitting fine.
funny!
Who knew that diamond merchants had been ripping us off all these years?
From what I understand Diamonds are only classified as semi-precious stones. DeBeers has been very effective in artificially proppoing up the price of diamonds and of course using ads to encourage demand.
sing ta na na - ta na na nah
diamonds on the sole of her shoes
(shameless Paul Simon lyric reference)
:-)
I've never understood the fascination with diamond rings. They are pretty of course, but so are garnets, opals, pearls and other semi-precious gems.
From my limited knowledge of jewelry, I think emeralds and rubies are more precious stones.
aww man, you beat me to it!
Rubies, Emeralds and sapphires (untreated) are all far more rare than first class diamonds. De Beers should be cursed then thanked for jacking up the price of their stones and for then keeping that price up.
I keep waiting for the "DeBeers diamond mine slaves" stories to break.
I have a star sapphire that, I think, is much prettier than a diamond.
If you think the price is too high then don't buy them. You are the one who is giving them value in the first place.
De Beers is making great money by selling the fantasy that Diamonds are somehow a means to happiness and elegance. I see just a giant waste of money that could be better invested.
People would scream like hell if the diamond market suddenly opened up and the prices floated like the price of gold.
The whole concept of engagement and wedding rings, and that those rings MUST contain diamonds, is basically a false "tradition" invented by De Beers.
It's probably the single greatest achievement in advertising of any corporation in the history of the world.
Who would be screaming? I doubt the average person....Diamonds would fluctuate from dirt cheap to really dirt cheap and back to dirt cheap.
The interesting thing is that if the prices floated diamonds would be so cheap women would no longer deem them an acceptable wedding/engagement gift, though.
Like the Video Professor, they will have my undying admiration for scamming the sheeple. Bravo!
Don't forget DeBeers doing ads saying a man needed to spend three months salary for an engagement ring. For someone earning an average salary of $40k thats $10k for a piece of carbon!!! After talking with my then gf I was able to get by cheaply when I got my wife an engagement ring.
Heh, yeah, the chutzpah of that occured to me right after I posted the last post; create a monopoly to artificially inflate diamond prices, and then tell poor young saps you've got to blow 2-3 months salary on an engagement ring....
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