Record-breaking 'Blue Moon' diamond bought for 7-year-old

Somewhere in Hong Kong there's a very lucky seven-year-old who has just had a couple of record-breaking diamonds named after her.

The girl's father, Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong billionaire property developer, bought "The Blue Moon", a rare South African 12.03-carat diamond, at a Sotheby's auction in Geneva yesterday for $48.4m (£32m). He promptly renamed it "The Blue Moon of Josephine" after his daughter.

Only a day earlier, on Tuesday, Lau acquired another rare gem from a Christie's auction: a 16.08 carat pink diamond bought for $28.5m (£19m), which was given the name "Sweet Josephine".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Both purchases have broken several records: "Sweet Josephine" for the largest diamond of its kind to be sold at an auction and "The Blue Moon of Josephine" for the most expensive diamond, the most expensive jewel ever sold at auction and the highest-ever price paid per carat.

The previous record for the most expensive diamond was held by the Graff Pink diamond, at 24.78 carats, which was sold by Sotheby's for £30m in November 2010.

But who is the buyer? The Guardian reports that Lau was locked in a telephone bidding war for eight minutes for "Blue Moon" and that this isn't the first time he has bought expensive gems for his daughter. In 2009, he bought another blue diamond, "The Star of Josephine", for $9.5m (£6.2m), even though Josephine would have been barely a year old at the time.

Indeed, the Daily Telegraph points out that Lau is a keen collector of all things expensive, including jets (he has a fleet of them), wines, jewellery and fine arts – his collection includes Andy Warhol and Paul Gauguin paintings.

The sixth-richest man in Hong Kong, Lau is also a wanted man in Macau, a semi-autonomous province in China, where he is due to serve a five-year jail sentence for money laundering, corruption and attempting to bribe a former minister. Unless he sets foot in Macau, however, he's free to roam about, buying gemstones.