de Kort & Partners

Two counterfeit grading reports were discovered in Antwerp, Belgium, the Gemological Institute of America said. The two reports were purportedly for D Flawless stones. The buyer became suspicious and had one of the diamonds tested. "It turned out to be a high-pressure, high-temperature annealed," said Tom Moses, senior vice president of the GIA Laboratory and Research.

More companies will be victims of industrial espionage...spying by competitors for inside dope on product development, bidding, etc., as a way of gaining advantage in business negotiations, contract pricing.

Top targets: High tech, biotech, defense and telecommunications.

Much of the snooping is legal...sleuths chatting up technicians at trade shows, befriending disgruntled workers, sifting through garbage.

A TAIWANESE company and two of its former executives were sentenced and fined for stealing trade secrets from adhesives maker Avery Dennison Corp., Pasadena, Calif. It was the first case tried under the 1996 Economic Espionage Act. In another case, a leak of early design information cost a mediumsized producer of consumer electronics goods some $35 million in anticipated sales when a competitor obtained the information and used it to introduce its own version of the product twice as fast as the item's originator expected.

FINANCIAL DUE DILIGENCE SERVICES is a discipline lacking definition, scope, clarity and agreement in Australia within the accounting profession. The poor cousin among financial disciplines, it has no mandatory requirements, yet the impact of properly conducting (or not conducting) financial due diligence can have a stunning impact on investment returns.