(Business in Cameroon) - The Mobilong diamond deposit, located in the logging township of Yokadouma, in Eastern Cameroon, is currently “under revaluation, in order to determine the exact contents”, the Cameroonian Minister of Mines, Ernest Ngwaboubou, revealed in an interview to the governmental daily newspaper.

This revaluation should primarily help in, according to our sources, reaching a final agreement on the actual potential of this deposit which has been the subject of controversy since 2010, after the revelations of the Korean firm C&K Mining which started exploring it from 2006.

Indeed, C&K Mining, which has since end 2014 sold its assets on the Mobilong project to a Chinese-American investor, has been accused of having overestimated the potential of this diamond deposit (736 million carats at first, representing 5 times the world production), then presented as the most important in the world.

But, it finally transpired that this overestimation had been done solely for market speculation purposes (after the announcement, the C&K Mining stock jumped on the Seoul stock market, multiplying its trading price by 4.6 in only 16 days), since a second valuation by the same operator brought the potential of the Mobilong diamond deposit back down to 420 million carats, though the sedimentary unit has not yet been submitted to a proper assessment.

The Mobilong scandal had generated a mini-political crisis in South Korea, which was at the time characterised by the arrests of senior managers in the public administration and the army, as well as the Chairman of C&K Mining, Deuk Gyun Oh, who was released in September 2014.

Brice R. Mbodiam