Who is Martin Rapaport?

During the last decades, Martin Rapaport is considered one of the most respected and powerful personalities in the international diamond market. During the 70’s he begins his activities in New York as the founder of companies aiming at informing the people involved in the diamond market. He specifically publishes a magazine specialized on the extracting and handling of diamonds, while organizing an annual seminar on diamonds in New York. The name Rapaport became famous worldwide from the catalog of the same name, a reference used worldwide for the prices of diamonds. The publication of this catalog, the Rapaport Diamond Report, started in the end of the 70’s, and was the first to define the gross price of selling polished diamonds per carat is defined, depending of the quality of each diamond. From this moment, the workshop, the trader and the consumer were aware of the price for which each diamond should be sold. This catalog was a real revolution in the sector of diamond handling, since the knowledge gained by the people trading and the new transparency lowered the prices of diamonds and concurred to the increase of their popularization. Rapaport’s convictions and actions brought him in controversy with De Beers, a company which monopolizes almost all the extracting and the handling of diamonds in the world, did not agree to any kind of formulism based on the grounds that each diamond is unique therefore it has to be priced independently and as a unity. This somewhat blurry scenery led to the high pricing of diamonds. This phenomenon was drastically reduced with the edition of the RDR. Today Rapaport is a member of the World Diamond Council and an active member of the Kimberley Process. He works in close collaboration with the GIA (Gemological Institute of America), while together they constitute the strongest pole in evaluating and pricing diamonds in the world.