Russian miner Alrosa said on August 1 that it plans to sell a rare collection of five polished diamonds produced domestically, including a 51.38-carat gem, at an online auction in November.
The huge, traditional round-cut diamond is named Dynasty, and it has a 1-inch diameter that's equal in size to the visible part of a human eye. The stone has a 57-facet traditional round brilliant cut with triple excellent cut, D colour and VVS1 clarity.
The other stones in the collection are a 16.67-carat round-cut diamond, a 5.05-carat oval diamond, a 1.73-carat pear-cut diamond, and a 1.39-carat diamond.
According to Alrosa, it is potentially the most expensive diamond manufactured in the history of Russian jewellery because of its quality.
It took 18 months for Alrosa's specialists to create five polished diamonds for the collection from a 179-carat Romanovs rough diamond, which was extracted at one of the company's mines in Russia's far eastern Yakutia region in 2015.
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The collection is dedicated to the Tsar Peter the Great, who built the city of St Petersburg, and the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia for 300 years, Alrosa, the world's largest producer of rough diamonds in carat terms, said in a statement.
Alrosa's decision to produce these polished diamonds and sell them online fits with a broader industry quest to find new ways to the market and add value on the part of gem producers. Alrosa and Anglo American's De Beers unit, which for the first time auctioned polished stones this year, produce about half of the world's rough diamonds.
During a media presentation of the collection in a luxury hotel in Moscow, Alrosa's chief executive Sergey Ivanov said that the company planned to sell the whole collection in one set. According to him, the starting price at the auction should be not less than US$10 million (Dh36.7 million).
* Reuters
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