Diamonds are a girl’s best friend for Swatch

Jeweller Harry Winston is selling its watches-to-necklaces division to Swatch Group in a $750m (€562m) cash deal that expands the Swiss watchmaker’s luxury offering and lets the Canadian group concentrate on its diamond mines.

Yesterday’s deal reverses a 2004 acquisition which turned Harry Winston, the group that discovered what became Canada’s Diavik diamond mine — now controlled by Rio Tinto — into a miner and jeweller.

The original mining arm is renamed Dominion Diamond Corporation after the sale of the Harry Winston luxury business, which started as a small jeweller in New York in 1932 and rapidly became a favourite with movie stars.