Rockwell welcomes African Renaissance as its BEE partner

Rockwell Diamonds Inc. announced that it had reached agreement with African Renaissance Holdings Limited ("ARH") as its new black institutional investor who will acquire a 30% equity stake in the Company's Middle Orange operations1, as its black economic empowerment ("BEE") partner as required by South African Law.

Subsequent to the announcement during early December 2013, ARH has fulfilled most of the conditions precedent and has already supported the Company in relevant matters.

ARH was established early in 1994 to champion active participation and ownership by black South Africans in strategic economic sectors. Following a restructuring of its shareholder constellation, ARH currently chaired by Bobby Makwetla, will pursue its successful investment track record in both listed and unlisted entities in sectors including telecommunications, mining, diamonds and related services.

"Following an exhaustive process to identify a new partner who shared our approach and vision and wanted to work with us to deliver on our objectives, we identified ARH who has an established track record in value creating BEE transactions. We are excited about this new partnership and confident that together this transaction will add significant value to our business going forward," said James Campbell, CEO, Rockwell. "Rockwell has always been committed to participating in the economic transformation in South Africa. We consider the finalization of this strategic partnership as an important milestone in our voyage towards building a leading value-focused African diamond business with a strong social license to operate in partnership with all our stakeholders. Further contributing to this was our recent achievement of 1,000,000 hours of lost time injury free operations across the whole group in mid January. This is the first time that we have achieved this landmark at a company-wide level since mid 2012, demonstrating the strength of our safety practices."