A new links of london jewelry between the South African diamonds giant De Beers and a key Pounds 20 million holding in Minorco, the Luxembourg company which last month launched Britain's biggest-ever takeover bid, has been unearthed.

Inquiries by the Guardian Links of London Earrings show that a Swiss company holding 3.13 million Minorco shares has as its sole director a man who also sits on the board of several De Beers offshoots.

Minorco is bidding for London-based Consolidated Gold Fields. The Luxembourg company claims that if the bid goes through Two Hearts Charm Red , South African interests - represented by De Beers, its sister company Anglo American, family holdings of South Africa's Oppenheimer mining dynasty and their associates - will not have control of the combined group. But the hitherto undisclosed Swiss-held stake will push the Oppenheimer-linked holdings to virtually 50 per cent.

The degree of South African control over any merged group has emerged as a crucial issue in the battle for ConsGold. Anti-apartheid campaigners and the British company maintain that South African domination of ConsGold could damage the group's businesses. The British company has investments in the US, Australia and Papua New Guinea U Charm .

I wish I could say with complete confidence that this is all utter nonsense valentine's Day gifts sale , but the truth is that there are still elements in our industry that operate with blatant disregard for the law, for the rules that govern our business, for the norms of acceptable behaviour in today's society. If we are to ensure that our children can inherit our businesses, that the children of Africa can benefit from the great blessings that diamonds can bring to their communities Links of London Charms , that the livelihoods of everyone working in diamonds across the world are protected, we must adopt a policy of zero tolerance towards those - and their activities - who bring our industry into disrepute and jeopardise our future.

I look to the leaders of the industry assembled here - and all diamantaires of good faith - to drive out, isolate and eject from our business those who refuse to accept and embrace the absolute imperative to operate - in all we do - in an ethical and morally responsible manner. We will be judged not by our words, but by our actions. We must demonstrate clearly and publicly that the diamond business is a great business, devoting its efforts - of course through making money, providing employment and paying its taxes, but also through its active engagement in Dice Charm , economic, environmental and development investment - to a real and sustainable contribution both to the societies in which we all live and work and to those less fortunate than ourselves.

Having said that, I am very much heartened by the excellent progress made in your deliberations here in Israel and am confident that WFDB and IDMA - and all of us by working together - will meet the challenges that lie before us in the same spirit of unity and determination shown over the past six years. De Beers will continue to help and support your work in this crucial area.

The diamond business is a great business Disc charm , a business which my family and De Beers is proud to be a part, but none of us must ever forget that it is a business that needs tendering and care.

With those elements, there is no doubt that it is a business that will grow and flourish through the generations.

Within 10 years, Links of london has become an established international chain of jewellery stores, and further expansion lies ahead. Liz Morrell reports.

As a jewellery chain that started out as a wet fish business, valentine's Day links of london on sale has turned out to be a good catch.

The business was founded 10 years ago when chairman John Ayton's wife and business partner, Annoushka Ducas, designed a range of silver fish cufflinks. They were Christmas presents for the chefs who bought from her business.

After selling the surplus cufflinks to a department store, Ducas and Ayton realised there was a demand for the product. Two years later, the couple opened their first store, in the City.

Ayton says: "The retail side came out of a desire to see the product we designed in its own environment."

In 1995, Links of London Bracelets opened its first airport store, which was followed two years later by the debut of its first international store, in Hong Kong. The retailer now has a presence in France, Italy, Germany, the Middle East and Singapore.

At present, Links has 14 stores in the UK and eight overseas. It recently opened its first US shop in New York and expects to open its first stores in China this year. It is also investigating the potential of Spain and Portugal. More US stores are slated for this year.

Over the next three years, the retailer plans to open up to 50 new stores, and has set its sights on flotation in the longer term.

Primarily a men's gift business, Z Charm expanded into women's jewellery in 1995, with the women's range now making up 40 per cent of the business.

There are also plans to increase Links of london's wholesale business.

At present, the company has around 50 wholesale accounts in the UK and the same number abroad.

For the year to the end of this month, the retailer expects sales of around GBP 14 million, rising to GBP 21 million next year Y Charm .

Links drafted in its first managing director, former Hackett boss Gareth Morris, last year.

Ayton and Ducas will focus on strategic development and adding more polish to the retail chain.

FORMER US Federal valentine's Day gifts on sale  chairman Alan Greenspan's autobiography The Age of Turbulence came under fierce attack yesterday.

Some of his dire forecasts about both the strength of inflation and the weakness of the British housing market have Links of London Charms corners of the Square Mile, especially as some elements of the sub-prime mortgage crisis arguably can be laid at his door.

"It was after all Alan Greenspan who encouraged personal debt levels of Americans to increase, " says BGC Partners senior strategist Howard Wheeldon.

"It was Greenspan that allowed the subprime market to grow without any recognition of potential dangers, " he adds.

NEW York jeweller Tiffany & Co is Pink Heart Charm Bracelet London-listed diamond miner Target.

Tiffany, which is investing GBP 2.5million in the Sierra Leone miner in return for first refusal over its stones, is impressed by Target's ethical standards.

THE Office of Fair Trading has appointed Barney Wyld, PR executive behind the Government's Smokefree England campaign, as its new communications director.

OVER-50s heading off on Saga Pink Heart Charm Signature Necklace can take part in activities ranging from hot air ballooning to ghost hunting following a tie-up with Warner Leisure Hotels.

India, which has been demanding sanctions against South Africa, conducts trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year with the subsidiary of a South African mining company, according to official sources links of london sale .

Much of the trade involves the importation of rough diamonds by the Indian gem-cutting industry through the Diamond Trading Corporation, the London-based marketing arm of De Beers Consolidated Mines, the South African mining conglomerate.

India, which employs about 350,000 craftsmen in gem cutting, then exports the finished diamonds to the United States, Japan and other countries. Imports through the Diamond Trading Corporation comprise about a third of India's diamond purchases, according to one official.

At a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Links of London Bangles last month and again at the meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, of leaders of nations professing nonalignment, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India has called for immediate sanctions against South Africa.



De Beers in unimaginable suppleness, dimensionality and brilliance.

The designs offered by Harry Winston are exceptional, executed with flawless craftsmanship, and utterly timeless. Based on these founding principles, Harry Winston is a modern leader of the ultra luxury jewelry and timepiece business worldwide.

Harry Winston currently has 12 locations around the world, in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, Bal Harbour, Osaka, Taipei and Honolulu and will open in Dallas later this year.

Harry Winston is owned by the Aber Diamond Corporation, the world's premier publicly traded diamond company. Aber holds a 40% interest in the world-class Diavek Diamond mine in Canada's Northwest Back to School Chubby Red Pencil Charm .

 POOR old De Beers is being harassed on all sides valentine's Day links of london  .

Though the diamond giant claims everything is tickety-boo with resurgent sales, chairman Julian Ogilvie Thompson warns of 'the likely increases in the flow of rough diamonds from Angola and the US stockpile, and uncertainty over possible leakages of Russian goods'.

All very ominous but cynics are also remarking on the coincidence that the £150 million recently raised on the capital markets equates neatly with the cost of the current final dividend payout Links of london Bangles .

Meanwhile, the cartel has slapped a libel writ on the BBC over its Diamond Empire documentary, the second instalment of which goes out on Sunday night.

And according to South African reports, the cartel has had to compensate its partners in the Venitia Mine, Anglo Vaal Reindeer Charm .

Vaal's principal owners, the Meynell and Hertsov families, thought they were getting a rough deal and planned to float their interest on the Johannes- burg Stock Exchange, which would have made things more transparent.  However, they have since been placated by De Beers and have withdrawn the flotation.

To keep the local brokers sweet, instead of being summoned up the road to Kimberley they have been invited on a 'colonial cringe' trip in May to London and Antwerp.

De Beers' largesse does not this time extend to their flights.

Fisher king of the East

BRIAN Fisher - lawyer, one-time London property dealer, and the man who beat one of the first insider-dealing raps (Thomson T-Line) - is now making his mark in Eastern Europe. Having gone to Warsaw on a whim four years ago, he is now the successful publisher of Estates News, the monthly bible of Western property people trying to make a go of it in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Judging by the quality of the ads, which include huge full-page puffs from the likes of DHL and Coopers & Lybrand, Fisher is more than washing his face.

He says he has no regrets about leaving the City. 'It is a lot of hard work but I feel more on-track, more honest with myself Fairy Godmother Charm .'

Sporting jeans, raincoat and a mad-professor haircut, Fisher says there are four types of people who make it out to Eastern Europe. He has catalogued them A, B, C and D - alcoholics, bankrupts, crooks and divorced.

When asked which category he fits into, Fisher just shrugs his shoulders and smiles.

Birds of a

feather

WHAT is the link between Coronation Chicken and merchant bank Robert Fleming directors? You may well ask.

The cold collation has been served up at every single monthly meeting for Fleming's directors for at least the past 18 months.

After a time, certain of the more imaginative young executives expressed their concern at the alarming regularity with which the dish appeared.  Obligingly, kitchen staff withdrew it at the very next luncheon.

Alas though, for Fleming gourmets, some of their colleagues are clearly creatures of habit. There was such a clucking over the absence of the monthly Coronation chick that it was reinstated without further cock-a-doodle-do and there it remains.

THE SWEDES' famed obsession for hanging out their washing in public has been taken to lip-smacking lengths by the country's telephone operator Telia, which this week unveiled plans to break into the British market.

The official background information on UK managing director John Geary reveals in unblushing detail not only that the Mansfield lad ran away to sea at 17 but also that as a private yacht skipper in the Caribbean he did a bunk to Sweden with the cook.

Ministering

under Palumbo

JAMIE Palumbo, one-time merchant banker and protg of George Magan at Hambro Magan, is in the eye of a storm over the legal battle with his father about the management of the family trust.

Meanwhile he is piling up a fortune of his own to a hard rhythmic beat that takes no prisoners. His deafening Ministry of Sound club, buried in the concrete jungle of the Elephant & Castle, packs in 1250 people every Friday and Saturday night at £15 a head.

The place has now won establishment recognition by the award of an alcohol licence. This usefully undermines opinion of the venue as an

ecstasy-ridden factory of rave. Palumbo has a dream that one day the business could be floated on the Stock Exchange.

But it has not all been jam for the poor little rich boy. The initial venture went bust and having lost, with his South African partner, close to half a million pounds, Palumbo liquidated the company before renegotiating the rent and starting up again on his own.

It is certainly going swimmingly now. Palumbo is currently negotiating to replicate the formula in Taipei, capital of Taiwan, with Jakarta also on the agenda.

He has found a band- wagon on which to roll in the mindless syncopating rhythms of modern music sweeping all harmony aside.

Like little Nina from Argentina, this endless wriggling of guts must ultimately send us all nuts, but it's the name of the money-making game in music right now. Just this week Pal- umbo has launched a compilation of re-mixed disco music on the Warner label and scored an even bigger coup with a Ministry of Sound tour of Britain's universities sponsored by one of the world's biggest drinks manufacturers.

The Ministry has also launched a clothing accessories business based in Covent Garden.

By  DAVID LIVINGSTONE

NEW YORK

NOW that some element of caprice has links of london admitted to the male wardrobe,

the amusement of accessories seems bound to follow. At the Designers'

Collective presentation of spring 86 last week, playthings seemed more

pertinent than ever.

An admitted "fan of whimsy," Marla Buck, the jewelry designer of

Toronto origins and head-turning style, was purveying the most playful.

She chose her first appearance at the Collective to present samplings from

both her women's and men's Links of London Necklaces , both so brimming with the big and

bold that they broke through conventional thoughts of gender as well as

kissed off any lingering notions that reserve and discretion have anything

to do with body adornment.

Wearing an Egyptian-print Gaultier jacket (and bustled Hamnett skirt),

her eyes done to play an epic Sweetie Wide Ring , Buck was a walking cargo of

Egyptiana: Egyptian heads on the ears; an enormous pin bearing rows of

pendants with an Egyptian head at its centre; round one wrist, a mile-wide

bracelet consisting of Egyptian heads, scarabs, milky cabochons,

rhinestones, and interlinking gold beads.

Readily conceding that it has little to do with the reality of the

country, Buck describes her vision of Egypt as strictly a "trip-down-the-

Nile" fantasy of which men might partake in the form of cufflinks shaped

like Nefertiti's noggin.

Besides exotic antiquity, Buck has been influenced by the present and

the personal. Her body-building boyfriend inspired the trophy-sized brooch

of a strongman balancing an elephant on a barbell while he himself walks

upon the back of a stone- studded cat.

While not always on the scale of Buck's sterling-encased half-dominos,

cuff links, nonetheless, seem to be resurfacing. Though women's wear

designers such as Marc Jacobs are already exploring the effects of French

cuffs, exhibitors of men's shirts at the Collective were apt to think of

them only as formal. This was a particular shame, given that other

exhibitors had such attractive links to show. Roberto Davido, in fact,

only last season started to make them and offered some small, smart

sterling ones in geometric shapes, but with rounded edges that at the same

time made them appear organic. Sirens Leaf Earrings by Ted Wolter were less modern

but equally small and serious. Some were of silver with Chinese lattice

patterns executed in enamel; other beauties were of coral and onyx, lapis

and gold.

While just behind the Berkshire Place Hotel, at the Museum of

Broadcasting, there were screenings of rediscovered episodes of The

Honeymooners - among other reasons, worth rediscovering for Ed Norton's

way with a fedora - hats at the Designers' Collective were a

disappointment. English designer Stephen King had brought some fine ones

from London, with high, flat crowns and rolled brims, but Marsha Akins for

Makins Hats seemed pinched for ideas. She presented some bright colored

straws, a burlap baseball cap, pith helmets, and only one flat-top.

By contrast, Linda Silver, founder of Roy Face Care for Men, was a

fount of innovation. Silver, who is based in Los Angeles, has formulated a

system of shaving cream plus nine conveniently numbered products that

begin with Face Wash, end with Egyptian Thorn Mask, and take in a Collagen

Cream, an Eye Balm, and a Night Pre-Shave which, while sleep knits up the

ravelled sleeve, is making the face ready for the morning blade. Sparked

by her discovery that the hair on the head is not the same as the hair on

the face, Silver has also thought up a Beard Cleanser, meant to make the

beard shinier and to prevent itching.

Hands thus freed from scratching might then be employed to make entries

into one's British Filofax binder, an organizational system for which now

exist some 200 different kinds of inserts. New for spring is what

travellers have been waiting for, an expense envelope into which are to be

tucked all those little receipts that document the all the nickels and the

dimes of the businessman's days.

A glittering exhibit of pre-revolutionary jewelry  links of london and treasures, many never before displayed, opened in the Kremlin today, heralding Russia's desire to reclaim the fabulous and even excessive traditions of Faberge and the czars.

"The World of Faberge," on view in the Kremlin bell tower exhibition hall through Jan. 15, features more than 230 jewel-studded, filigreed necklaces, cigar cases, cuff links and other possessions of the rich and royal of late-19th- and early-20th-century Russia.
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