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Angola has removed the world’s largest diamond miner, Russian state-owned Alrosa, from its mines ahead of a visit by US President Joe Biden to the southern African country.
The cabinet of Angola’s President João Lourenço approved the sale of Alrosa’s stake in a state-owned Angolan miner on Thursday because of sanctions on the Russian producer, Angolan government media said.
Alrosa’s exit is a boost for US efforts to extend the global reach of sanctions, and suggests Luanda is moving closer to Washington after decades of ties with Moscow and Beijing.
Oil-rich Angola is a significant exporter of crude to China and is also Beijing’s biggest borrower in Africa, while its ruling MPLA party was a Soviet ally during the cold war.
Under Lourenço, Angola has won US backing for a rail corridor to transport copper from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to the country’s ports. Biden’s visit next week will be the first by a US president.
Maaden International Investment, an Omani investor consortium, will take over Alrosa’s 41 per cent stake in Catoca, an Angolan company that owns the world’s fourth-largest diamond mine.
Terms of the stake sale, such as a purchase price, were not disclosed. Endiama, Angola’s state diamond company, owns another 41 per cent of Catoca. In 2022 the Angolan government told the Financial Times it had seized the balance of the ownership from a Chinese investor.
Diamantino Azevedo, Angola’s mining and petroleum minister, on Thursday said sanctions led to the decision to end the partnership. The US placed curbs on Alrosa soon after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Angola’s diamond exports have never been formally subject to sanctions because Alrosa did not own a majority of Catoca. But Russian links made buyers of the country’s diamonds wary, in what is already a tough global market for the stones this year because of falling demand.
Tensions between Catoca’s owners increased after the EU added Alrosa to its own list of curbs over the war in January this year, making it even harder to market Angolan diamonds, people with knowledge of the situation told the FT.
Alrosa’s exit will end more than two decades of Russian involvement in Angolan diamond exploration and production, dating back to the 1990s, before the end of the country’s civil war in 2002.
The producer helped to develop Catoca, which produces more than 6mn carats a year, and Luele, a newer mine, and received hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends.
Alexei Moiseev, Russia’s deputy finance minister, told Russian media last month that Alrosa was ready to exit Angola, but it would not sell its stake in Catoca to Anglo American-owned De Beers, the group’s biggest rival in the global diamond market.
This year Oman’s Maaden also acquired a 24 per cent stake in Polymetal, from a group of investors as the gold producer prepared to exit its Russian business.
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