Dubai: Closing the final day of this week’s KP Intersessional, Ahmed Bin Sulayem, KP Chair, said, “I am particularly happy that the CAR Monitoring Team has by and large completed its verification and due diligence on the first shipment of the compliant zone of Berberati in the Central African Republic. The Working Group ‎of Monitoring took good notice of the Team’s hard work and we expect to have full clearance in the next few days. This will be a great relief for the people of this country as well as a first step towards the resumption of further exports.”

“I also wish Venezuela well on its return KP family. The discussions are moving forward and I am confident we will see the country re-admitted to full KP membership within the near future,” Bin Sulayem added.

The KP Chair also announced that two further workshops will be held during the course of the year, regarding the special forum on rough diamond valuation.

“We will continue to seek guidance and leverage the extensive knowledge of the OECD in this matter, and also include experts from the diamond industry, ‎professional valuators, the large mining corporations, auction and tender houses and representatives from the different leading price lists, with the goal to ultimately establish best practice principles which could be included in the KP framework.”, he added.

Sulayem also briefly discussed how the UAE is currently pursuing a local pilot project to evaluate how the KP can benefit from using Blockchain technology to better coordinate flow of diamond-related data while improving traceability, transparency and streamlining the business process across the supply chain.