David Bennett, Sotheby’s auctioneer
who accepted the winning bid for the newly-named Chloe Diamond in Geneva Wednesday night.

[Update, 15 November, 07:00, 2 links added]

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The founder of Guess jeans, Georges Marciano, Wednesday bought a little something to slip into the pocket of one of those jeans, an 84.37 carat gem of a diamond that he has baptized Chloe Diamond in honour of his 12-year-old daughter. The diamond was sold to Marciano for a cool $16.2 million ($16,189,769 to be precise), which at $191,980 a carat is the highest price per carat ever paid for a white diamond at auction.

Chloe is the world’s largest, purest white flawless brilliant-cut diamond sold at auction, according to Sotheby’s, which sold the gem in front of a standing-room only crowd of mainly private buyers, in the centre of Geneva.

Marciano was in California, where he lives, and he bought the gem by telephone in an astonishing two-minute sale that came down to two buyers bidding hard at the end.

The world’s highest-priced diamond, Star of the Season which weighs a little over 100 carats, was sold in Geneva in May 2007, also by Sotheby’s, for $16.5 million. It took a more leisurely 22 minutes to reach that price. Chloe was expected to sell for $13-15 million.

Marciano told Lisa Hubbard of Sotheby’s New York office, who took
his telephone bid, that he saw a news spot on CNN about the diamond
"and he was captivated." After the sale he was " extremely happy," said
an exuberant Hubbard.

He hadn’t said what he might do with it – "I don’t think he’s got
that far,’ she laughed. She agreed that his daughter has time to grow
into the over-sized white rock.

Chloe, reprinted with permission, Sotheby’s 2007.

Lisa Hubbard shows journalists the diamond after the sale. Photo, E Wallace

Equally happy was seller Ron Cohen, also in California. Cohen, who is CEO of Clean Diamonds,
a holding company in Los Angeles, told GenevaLunch after the sale that
he bought the diamond from the Angolan government diamond company, the
only legal seller of diamonds in Angola, where the gem was found. His
company’s name is a double-entendre, meaning both that his gems are Kimberley Process clean
diamonds and that  he works with the highest quality ones, known in the
industry as "clean" for their purity. "My business is to cut large
stones. I evaluated [this one] and saw that it was going to be a real
gem." He took two years to decide how to cut it, then had the work done
in Antwerp.

Wednesday night, auctioneer David Bennett, who is Sotheby’s Geneva
specialist for precious jewels, said over a cigar after the sale that
"I’ve been doing this for 32 years, but this stone had the ability to
take my breath away." The size of the original stone was exceptional,
he pointed out, but a brilliant-cut diamond is created only with
enormous loss and Chloe is a mere 28% of her original size.

Remarkably, the stone’s existence was known to few people before
September, shortly before the November precious jewels sale catalogue
was printed. In September Cohen contacted Bennett to ask
if Sotheby’s would like to auction it. "We’d tried to keep it a secret,
to
keep a low profile," he recalls. The diamond was never given a name,
not even a nickname. "No, we kept that open for the buyer."

Cohen is pleased that Marciano bought the stone, and that he named
it after his daughter. The two spoke by phone shortly after the sale.
"It’s funny: we both live in Beverly Hills but we "went" to Geneva for
this! We talked and said we’re going to drink some champagne together
this week, to celebrate."

Cohen says Sotheby’s did a great job. A world tour was organized for
the diamond, which was particularly well-visited in Asia and the Middle
East, according to Bennett.

The diamond, despite its lustre and high pricetag, accounted for
only 28% of the total sales of $57 million in jewels at the Geneva
auction. Several pieces of jewelry went for amounts well above what was
expected, good news for Sotheby’s, whose shares lost one-third of their
value on the stock market a week earlier, according to Reuters, when an Impressionist and modern art sale in New York gave disappointing results.

Geneva’s "magnificent jewels" sale should give investors in that
market faith. Hubbard, commenting on the overall sale, said that
"anything with style, anything with a signature" sold well.

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