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Anglo ups De Beers stake
BOTSWANA said yesterday it had declined an option to lift its stake in diamond giant De Beers, leaving miner Anglo American with the full $5.1bn (£3.25bn) price tag for a buy-out of the remaining shares owned by the Oppenheimer family.
Anglo formally offered the Botswana government a pro-rata share of the Oppenheimer family’s 40 per cent stake under a long-standing pre-emption agreement.
But Botswana’s ministry of minerals said in a statement the price was too high, equal to about 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product,
First-half profit halved at De Beers as trade buyers were held back by a lack of funds.