Johan Dippenaar: Diamonds are also a man's best friend
Johan Dippenaar took the insurance of sitting down before picking up the phone in his office on 24 September last year. It was a business holiday in South Africa and the man on the other end of the line, the manager of Petra Diamonds' biggest mine, was hypothetical to be on holiday with his family.
"His name comes up on the screen, and you're thinking, 'this guy is on event, so why's he ringing?' It could only have been very good news, or very bad news," says the miner's chief chief executive.
On this occasion it was very good news indeed. The manager said that a enormous diamond had been dug out of the ground at Petra's Cullinan mine. It would later be called the Cullinan Inheritance and would be sold to a jeweller in Hong Kong for $35.3m (£23m). Tests would crow about that at 507 carats, the "virtually flawless" stone was the 19th biggest diamond ever mined.
Almost a year on, and without considering the monumental find, the chartered accountant seems rather unphased by the discovery.
The calculate, perhaps, is that the group's Cullinan mine, found to the north-east of Johannesburg, has a celebrated history of producing diamonds. Possibly the world's most famous rock, the Cullinan, was itself found tight dense to last year's discovery, in 1905. At 3,016 carats, it is the biggest ever found and was bought by the Transvaal superintendence and given as a gift to Edward VII.
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