GLITTER and GREED

My new diamond book 'Glitter and Greed', available on this website, embodies all I have learnt in investigating corporate behaviour over a period of over 30 years - my first study, into the Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) British mining giant's operations on Aboriginal lands was back in 1975 - and resulted in the brilliantly reviewed 'The Mapoon Books'.I think it is my finest investigation - and a work of great value particularly for Africans.

In Glitter and Greed I use the diamond as a lens into a world of corporate greed that has impoverished Africa and other parts of the third world. Over a dozen African countries are rich in diamonds - and De Beers has been mining or selling their diamonds for over 100 years - somehow managing in doing this to leave these parts of Africa utterly impoverished.

I describe how De Beers managed to remove most of its profits untaxed from Southern Africa, in a scheme put in place as Nelson Mandela and the ANC come into power - and then, after doing this, managed also to befriend leading members of the ANC who I hope were utterly unaware of how De Beers was running around the government - and removing hundreds of millions of dollars from the taxable base of the impoverished South African economy. I also tell of how De Beers removed much of the wealth of West Africa without any check upon its greed.

I went into De Beers mines, into the heart of their diamond empire, to discover how De Beers was slashing wages to a third of the minimum agreed with the Union... paying workers so little that they could not afford to support a family. I found De Beers was producing diamonds at less than a dollar a stone on average. I lived with the miners' family, eat with them, and was smuggled back into mines after De Beers banned me form them, because of my articles that explained that De Beers had long been at the heart of the apartheid system - despite Harry Oppenheimer setting up a Chair of Human Rights at a South African university.

I went to the cutting workshops where over 90% of the world's gem quality stones were cut - and found that wages had been cut since 2000 from 40c American to cut and polish a diamond to just 23c per diamond - causing riots in the streets -while profits continued to escalate for De Beers and other major diamond merchants..

My photos taken in these diamond mines are also in this book .

Then there was the article that came out of an investigation of a major mine in Indonesia run by FREEPORT, a major American Company.

And another on MacDonalds - which my daughters insisted on calling MuckDonalds.

I hope to put up more of these studies here later.