The Diamond Trading Company’s sightholdership contract has received response from 100 existing DTC sightholders and an additional 100 aspirants, who have submitted their sight allocation contract proposal questionnaires (CPQs) to the Supplier of Choice (SoC) Ombudsman, Dermot Gleeson. Although the allocation for the three-year contract would officially initiate on April 1, 2008, (after a few months of transitional allocations) the initial sifting and sorting by the Ombudsman can be considered as the beginning to the process.

The Ombudsman would initially review all confidential information provided by a sightholder or applicant, thus filtering the profiles before they are presented to the DTC. The profiles would also go through a third-party verification process for forensic auditor checks, etc., after which, they would be reviewed by the Ombudsman before submissions to the DTC. The Ombudsman concentrate on deleting names (of customers, etc) and figures. He would then send the profiles with the deleted items back to the applicants.

Ombudsman’s role for dispute resolution was extended in January 2007, to now involve the cleansing of profiles for the sightholdership.