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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Thursday was an upbeat 88-64-158 as the TSX Venture Exchange leapt 18 points to 786. Jean-Raymond Boulle's -- one still has to get used to that -- Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM) rose one-half cent to five cents on 1.51 million shares. Yes, the stock was as low as one cent and as high as nine cents in the past year, but for the most part it remains stuck like glue near the five-cent mark.

The stagnation is not for a dearth of news: Mr. Boulle has just bought 133.33 million shares of Star at three cents, putting enough cash in the kitty to allow Ewan Mason, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, to purr about a quick dash to prefeasibility, which he cheers, "will enable a feasibility study on which a production decision can be based."

No further bulk sampling of the Orion South kimberlite is needed, say Mr. Mason and his crew, and that "results in the savings of millions of dollars in exploration expenditures and shaves significant time off the completion of the prefeasibility study." That is an understatement, given that Star Diamond's former co-venturer, Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc., spent north of $200-million on a modest bulk sampling effort at the Star pipe, a two-year effort -- four years, if you count the time the two companies squabbled in court over their arrangement.

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