The going gets rough for diamonds

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Housing a world where deals worth millions of dollars are sealed on the basis of handshakes, a slip of paper and the Hebrew oath “Mazal u’Bracha” (trust and bless), the Israeli Diamond Exchange is home to one of the world’s largest trading floors of its kind. On any given day, according to the diamond controller, some $10bn of the precious stones are on site, in safes, boxes, pouches or piled on the white paper blotters of some of its 2,500 registered “diamantaires”, the traders and cutters of the stones.

The system, say its advocates, is built on trust. But the opaque world of Israel’s diamond bourse in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, is under rare public scrutiny due to a criminal investigation into one of its own....

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