A judge yesterday jailed two men over a multimillion-dollar insider trading scheme she said was the worst example of the crime to come before an Australian court.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) employee Christopher Russell Hill, 25, fed sensitive, unpublished economic data to a banker he knew from higher education, Lukas James Kamay, 26, for use in foreign-exchange trades.
In sentencing, Victorian Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth said Hill made handwritten notes of yet-to-be released labor and other data and passed the information to Kamay by mobile phone.
Kamay then used this to correctly predict movements in the Australian dollar, entering into foreign-exchange derivative products to profit from those fluctuations.
He made losses to avoid suspicion and opened several trading accounts in 2013 and last year. However, the scheme was detected after authorities spotted suspicious trading in forex derivatives.
At the time, the ABS said the arrest of a staff member for unauthorized disclosure of statistics was “unprecedented in ABS history spanning more than 100 years.”
Kamay built up about A$7 million (US$5.35 million) in profit, but kept much of the earnings from Hill and ultimately the ABS worker received less than A$20,000 in payments.
Hollingworth said Kamay’s winnings were by “a very considerable margin” the largest insider trading profit to come before an Australian court.
However, she said that apart from his youth and early plea of guilty, there was little to mitigate her decision.
“The DPP [director of public prosecutions] is right to describe your conduct, Mr Kamay, as the worst instance of insider trading to come before the courts in this country,” she said.
While Hill never knew how much money Kamay made, thinking they had an agreement to never go beyond a profit of A$200,000, both men were motivated by “personal greed, pure and simple,” Hollingworth said.
She said that neither had a gambling addiction.
Kamay, who pleaded guilty to charges of insider trading, money laundering and identity theft, was sentenced to seven years and three months.
Hill was jailed for three years and three months, with a minimum term of two years, after pleading guilty to charges of abuse of public office and insider trading.
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