World's most expensive necklace on sale

5 Oct DailyMail

An egg-shaped diamond, found in a lump of rock by a poverty-stricken African girl, has gone on sale – as the centrepiece of the world’s most expensive necklace.

Known as L’Incomparable, the flawless yellow gem has more than 407 carats.The necklace is studded with 90 white diamonds weighing nearly 230 carats and it can be yours for £34million. It was created by luxury jeweller Mouawad and is being offered for sale at a Singapore jewellery show.Only serious potential buyers will get the chance to try it on.

For the L’Incomparable is protected by an army of security guards, plain-clothed supervisors, cameras, and motion detectors.Yet ‘serious interest’ has been shown by two potential buyers from Asia, Mouawad’s managing director Jean Nasr confirmed. One thing is certain, the child who found it in the 1980s will never benefit. Her identity and fate remains a mystery.

L’Incomparable was found in its rough state weighing 890 carats by the girl as she played in a pile of rubble outside her uncle’s house in the town of Mbuji Mayi in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rubble had been legitimately collected from the nearby MIBA Diamond Mine, after being rejected.To their eternal cost, the workers who assessed it had decided the rock was too bulky to be worth scanning for diamonds. But when the girl’s uncle saw the lump, he was convinced it was of value and sold it to local African diamond dealers for an unknown sum.

The dealers, in turn, sold it to a group of Lebanese buyers operating from Kinshasa, Kenya.It was later bought in Antwerp by De Beers and Sir Philip Oppenheimer, then president of the Central Selling Organisation and a De Beers director, sold it to the Zale Corporation, a Dallas-based jewellery store chain. It continued to grow in value until it finally went on display as a finished stone in the Natural History wing of Washington’s Smithsonian Institute.