De Beers learnt about the new owner after reports that there was a diamond rush in Marange and that there was uncontrolled diamond mining. It got concerned because the illegal mining activities were linked to the company.
Sources said immediately after registering its claims, ACR invited locals to help it collect the diamonds. But because the area had not been fenced, it failed to control the rush that followed.
ACR confirmed that things had got out of hand in its interim report for 2006 but added that “(the illegal miners) have now been largely cleared from the area by the police and should shortly be stopped entirely by fencing”.
De Beers pulled out of Marange because of the chaos leaving ACR with a free reign. The company listed on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market in June but it only announced that it had discovered diamonds in Marange in September, three months before it was booted out.
A statement it issued to shareholders in December 2006, said its title to the Marange Diamond deposits had been cancelled because the government argued that “that title should not have been granted in the first instance because of a pre-existing exploration licence over the same area”.
It lost the case in September 2010 when Judge Charles Hungwe, who had ruled in its favour a year earlier, reversed his decision because he had received new evidence that the ACR subsidiaries that held the claims to the Marange diamonds did not exist when the claims were registered.
Cranswick stepped down as a director of ACR on 18 January 2013. He had been chief executive officer of ACR since its establishment. At the time he held 15 133 960 shares in the company.
Efforts to get comment from Cranswick both to confirm what he told ATO officers and to establish the fate of Adonis have so far been unsuccessful as he has failed to respond to emails sent to him since October last year.
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