The Shefa Yamim company has been prospecting for diamonds in Israel's Kishon River since 1999. In the coming months, the firm is seeking to issue $100 million worth of stock. This is a new and different approach, since fundraising for diamond companies – especially Israeli ones – is done via banks and going public has never been an option.

According to TheMarker.com, The story of Shefa Yamim began in 1988, when Haifa's then-mayor, Arie Goral, traveled to New York to meet with the Lubavitcher rabbi who was the seventh Chabad admor and considered by many to be the Messiah, but has since passed away. The rabbi gave Goral a tip: "Haifa sits on the sea, and one shouldn't be impressed by depth. Haifa has a sea, and it has a valley, and the valley contains good and precious stones. The Lord has done something miraculous: he has hidden the stones deep in the earth, and it looks like they're deep in the river."

The 86-year-old rabbi's mention of "good stones" sparked considerable interest among the Chabad hassidim. They accepted it as prophecy, and decided to devote their time and money to finding the buried treasure.

The founder and CEO of Shefa Yamim is Avraham "Avi" Taub, who comes from a family of diamond dealers and worked his whole life polishing an selling diamonds. Sources close to Taub said he was so close to the rabbi that he decided to leave everything and devote his life to Shefa Yamim. In the early 1990s, the Lubavitcher rabbi instructed Taub to mine diamonds, which together with the prophecy, prompted Taub to found Shefa Yamim. The company took out mining licenses for the Zevulun Valley and Mount Carmel areas and began searching.

First name? Kalish, a former IAF pilot who found religion, is one of the more colorful and well-known figures in Israeli high-tech. In 2007 Forbes named him the best local venture capitalist. But he has also known some failures. 

Shefa Yamim employs dozens of workers and two vehicles. The company has some 200 stockholders, most of whom own shares in the company. The main stockholders are Eight Global Corp. (42.33%) and the Taub family's 101 Zahav Holdings (7.2%), which also has a number of other companies in the diamond, gold mining, and precious stones industries.

Thus far, some $10 million has been raised from private investors, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. In recent weeks Shefa Yamim has been busy preparing a draft prospectus for the securities authorities ahead of the stock issue. This isn't the first time Shefa Yamim has tried to issue stock. Before the global financial crisis took hold, the company tried to issue stock on London's AIM exchange but then reversed the decision. Right now, the worth of the company is a sticking point – Shefa Yamim wants to issue stock based on the $100 million valuation by Mount Morgan Resources.

The signatories doubt whether they will be able to raise money based on a $100 million company valuation, and a source said that "if the company had been interested in raising money based on a value of nothing, we would have taken the opportunity."

Shefa Yamim is the first and only company prospecting for precious stones in Israel. Anyone reviewing the history of searches for gold and gemstones in the Holy Land will see that searches for gold were conducted in the Eilat area, but called off. The company operates under the mining regulations of the National Infrastructures Ministry, and unlike companies prospecting for oil or natural gas – established as cooperative ventures – does not receive any reduction in income tax.

Over the past 11 years, the company has conducted a number of exploratory drills, which did not reveal the promised wealth, but turned up a number of other interesting things. In 2004 a kimberlite boulder was discovered on Mount Carmel. The De Beers syndicate took the rock to its laboratories, cut it open, and discovered micro-diamonds.

Shefa Yamim has discovered 76 diamonds, mostly micro-diamonds, and 14 kimberlite boulders. In addition, a few other precious stones – sapphires, rubies, emeralds, kainite, and corundrum. At the moment the company is not drilling, and the next plan is to drill into the kimberlite layer.

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A diamond may not be what it appears to be, or at least not belong to whom it appears to belong to. Serial numbers work in identifying electronics and cars – why not diamonds? Well, historically speaking, there was no way of getting a serial number onto a diamond without damaging it. But lasers have changed everything!

Diamond serial numbers are used by the Kimberley Process certification scheme, and serial numbers also allow the diamond industry and police to work with databases to track lost or – heaven forbid – stolen diamonds.

A serial number incised on a certified diamond's girdle allows an appraiser to confirm that the diamond in question matches the certificate it's supposed to. However, he notes, the only way to be completely sure that the certs match the diamond is to verify its measurements and note its blemishes and inclusions.

After all, anyone with the technical knowledge and equipment can inscribe a random serial number on a diamond. In fact, master diamond thieves take stolen diamonds to be re-polished so that a lasered-on serial number is removed, which would certainly appear to contradict the widely held belief that a serial number is permanent!

On the other hand, there are only a very few lasers in the world capable of removing a diamond's serial number with a minimal affect on the diamond's value, which has already been reduced by having its number removed and forces the diamond to be traded illegally.

Sources in the Antwerp diamond polishing sector have said that it's even more unusual to find an expert polisher who knows how to remove a serial number as well as how to re-cut the diamond to keep as much of its value as possible and make it impossible to identify.

Fred Cuellar, author of How to Buy a Diamond, writes:"I have to hand it to all those companies that keep trying to come up with some new gimmick to hook us on but come on, let’s put this in the simplest of terms. If we already have the fingerprint (the plotting) of the diamond we don’t need to carve our initials into it to prove it’s ours."

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Ask anyone about the great diamond centers of the world and they'll say Antwerp, Amsterdam, New York, and Tel Aviv. Few people associate Canada's frozen plains with cutting-edge diamond cutting, and yet Moke Botha, of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, has invented the world's most intricate diamond cut.

Botha, who has four decades of experience working with rough and polished diamonds all over the world, just about doubled the typical number of facets on a cut diamond (57, give or take) with a design featuring a whopping 111 facets.

While he didn't have to stop at 111, Botha said that his diamond design "came up trumps" and "hit the sweet spot," reaching what he described as "optimal brilliance."
Any additional facets, he explained, would have been going overboard and would have decreased the diamond's brilliance.

Kimberlight Brands, a luxury company based in Calgary, has already branded Botha's diamond design, naming it the "Las Vegas Cut."
What could be more appropriate than naming a diamond after Vegas, the city of bright lights and brighter jewelry, wondered Kimberlight co-owners Heather Kirk and Laura Serena. "Diamonds are about light and Las Vegas is about light," Serena explained.

The Las Vegas diamond cut became available in June and Botha has already gotten about six orders. Perhaps in anticipation – the new design is slated for a feature in a magazine for private jet owners, who can certainly treat themselves to diamond jewelry featuring the most intricate cuts available – Botha is already teaching colleagues how to execute and polish the 111-facet diamond cut.

To date, these diamonds have been sold loose rather than set as jewelry. Prices for a one-carat Las Vegas cut diamond start at $10,000.

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