de beers diamond cartel:
Namibia was illegally occupied by apartheid South Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The UN passed a special decree forbidding mining companies from extracting minerals unless they had specific permission. De Beers and its sister company, Anglo-American, defied this decree and made secret arrangements to overmine the diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. As the technical assistant to the mine manager, Gordon Brown felt it was his simple duty to blow the whistle and came forward to give hard evidence of this illegal behaviour to a judicial enquiry. Since then he has been targeted by members of De Beers' security and their colleagues in the Police Diamond Branch.
(...) 10 things we know about De Beers diamond cartel because of Gordon Brown

1. The Anglo-American corporation obtained control of the Namibian diamond deposit in highly dubious circumstances during and after World War I and ran it as a monopoly business even though the League of Nations/United Nations mandate expressly outlawed all monopolies.

2. De Beers took control of a diamond deposit the size of Wales in return for an annual ground remit of £130 per annum. This rent never changed between 1920 and 1970.

3. The Namibian Police Diamond and Gold branch was a De Beers front - with offices provided and furnished by the cartel.

4. The South West Africa Diamond Board was a joke watchdog with its offices situated in and paid for by De Beers.

5. The Diamond Board secretary, Stanley Jackson, was seconded to the post by his employers, De Beers and all controls over the movement of diamonds in and out of Namibia were in the hands of cartel officials.

6. The De Beers group opposed all cutting of diamonds in Namibia and structured itself to avoid tax and move minerals though a worldwide web of companies each of which added costs and subtracted profits in order to maximise De Beers returns abroad. This scam is known as transfer pricing.

7. The company had so effectively colonised the government mining department supposedly responsible for regulating it, that the top government mining officials didn't even know the name, never mind the detailed terms of the law they were supposed to enforce.

8. This put De Beers in prime position to abuse the mine, overexploit the diamonds by grade and stone size for many years while the cartel's friends in politics in Britain, America and South Africa delayed independence for Africa's last colony.

9. In this way De Beers shortened the life of the mine and took away an extra billion pounds worth of diamonds ahead of Namibian independence. With working costs at 25% of revenue this means that the company plundered £750 million in excess profit and unjust enrichment from a poor country heading for independence.

10. De Beers diamonds will be remembered as tokens of some people's wealth and other people's poverty because conditions at the world's richest mine were ferociously exploitative with black miners condemned to inhuman conditions, the shocking details of which Gordon Brown, among others, exposed.