The ongoing raids on the diamond industry in Antwerp have sent shockwaves through the global diamond industry. Over $150 million in goods have been seized and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the Antwerp diamond community. Rough dealers are now asking premiums as high as 15% on some categories of goods. Nobody seems to know when it will all end.
Many claim that the raids are only serving to accelerate the exodus that had already begun out of Antwerp to Dubai. The Belgian government should stop, they say, before it is too late. The Belgian government is not going to stop.
We live in a wired-up, closely interconnected world. A world that finds itself threatened by the shadowy world of international terrorism that uses the very technology of computers, the internet and wire-transfers, that has brought us all together to communicate, transfer funds and instructions and spread its insidious message.
So serious is this threat and so great the pressure from the United States for governments to join in the war against it, that most won’t hesitate to push the welfare of any business into the far background if there is even the slightest doubt that terrorism might benefit from it or any of its actions.
That the irregularities being investigated in Antwerp involve illegal diamond and fund transfers to various parts of the world routed through Switzerland might not have anything to do with Al Qaeda. They might be just the ‘usual’ sort of wrongdoing where businessmen try to dodge custom duty or taxes. But those are the very sort of things that ring loud alarm bells with the security agencies of most countries. Try hanky panky of that sort and any government – with perhaps a lot of US weight leaning on it – will throw the welfare of any industry to the wind and charge in with the strong arm stuff.
Dubai has a lot to offer the diamond industry (don’t forget – NO taxes!) and is going out of its way to make itself attractive. But anyone who thinks he can get away with something similar in Dubai is living in a fool’s paradise. Even if it does have an easygoing attitude, Dubai knows that its future lies in acting in concert with the international community. It will act vigorously if something like what happened in Antwerp happens there.
In a sense, being located in Antwerp might be better in the long run. US anti-money laundering regulators don’t get as tough with vendors from areas it thinks are better regulated in the first place.
