Concord Times (Freetown)

4 January 2008
Posted to the web 4 January 2008

Tanu Jalloh
Freetown

The Sunday Times has revealed how an energy company became embroiled in the "blood diamond" scandals of the 1990s in Sierra Leone and Angola.

Energem Resources which has just launched itself on the London stock market as a renewable-energy business is the same firm in which illegally traded diamonds were used to finance civil wars in Africa.

The company, with its head office in South Africa and registered office in Canada, used to be known as DiamondWorks. It changed its name in 2004 and gained its London AIM listing last month.

Canaccord Adams, the adviser that piloted it onto London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM), is headed by Tim Hoare, who sits alongside rock star and champion of Africa Bob Geldof on the board of the television-production company Ten Alps. Hoare has been a board member since March this year.

The hedge fund RAB Capital owns nearly 25% of Energem.

The stock-exchange announcement of Energem's AIM debut said the company was concentrating on oil distribution, biofuels and "procurement, supply and logistics management to industry in sub-Saharan Africa".

It referred to diamonds only in saying that last month Energem had decided to give up diamond-exploration rights in the Central African Republic.

Three of the directors were said to have had experience in mining diamonds.

There is no suggestion that the present management had any involvement in the blood diamond trade - an industry at one stage reckoned to be worth $1 billion (£500m) a year - in which civil wars, notably in Angola and Sierra Leone, were fuelled by selling the gems to buy arms.

For the full article, please visit: http://allafrica.com/stories/200801040760.html

IRIN In-Depth
Saturday 05 January 2008

(September 2007) Somewhere, some time this year, a baby will be born on the 25th floor of a city hospital or the dirt floor of a dark slum shack; a first-year college graduate will rent a cramped apartment in lower Manhattan or a family of five will finally concede their plot of farm land to an encroaching desert - or sea - and turn towards Jakarta or La Paz or Lagos in search of a new livelihood and a new home. The arrival of this family or graduate or baby will tip the world's demographic scale and, for the first time in history, more than half the human population will live in cities.

At present, 3.3 billion people live in urban centres across the globe. By 2030 this number is predicted to reach five billion, with 95 percent of this growth in developing countries. Over the next three decades, Asia's urban population will double from 1.36 billion to 2.64 billion, Africa's city dwellers will more than double from 294 million to 742 million, while Latin America and the Caribbean will see a slower rise from about 400 million to 600 million, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

While megacities appear more frequently in headlines and on development agendas, overall growth in urban centres of 10 million or more inhabitants is expected to level out. Instead, over the next 10 years, cities of less than 500,000 will account for half of all urban growth.

For the full article, please visit: http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=63&ReportId=73996