Two men were sentenced to jail Tuesday in Australia’s largest-ever insider trading case, which involved an employee of its national statistics agency, and a banker, trading on official economic data before its release.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) uncovered the scheme after suspicious trading was identified in the foreign derivatives market. Their investigation found that an employee of the National Australia Bank (NAB) was receiving sensitive information from an employee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), and that they were using this information to profitably trade foreign exchange derivative products.
In 2014, the two men were charged with insider trading, money laundering, and abuse of public office. Ultimately, the analyst at the ABS, Christopher Hill, pled guilty to four charges of abuse of public office, one charge of insider trading, and one charge of identity theft. The banker, Lukas Kamay, pled guilty to four charges of insider trading, one charge of money laundering, and two charges of identity theft. The pair, who met at university back in 2007, devised the scheme after meeting at a birthday party in 2013.
The pair were sentenced Tuesday by Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth of the Supreme Court of Victoria. Kamay was sentenced to seven years and three months, and Hill was sentenced to three years and three months; for their roles in the scheme, which generated approximately A$7 million ($6.8 million) in trading profits.
“For both of you, your motivation for committing these offences was personal greed, pure and simple,” the judge said in her sentencing decision.
In a statement, the ABS notes that the arrest and conviction of one of its employees for the unauthorized disclosure of statistics is “unprecedented” in the agency’s 110-year history. “This outcome clearly demonstrates that actions such as Mr. Hill’s, which seriously breached the trust placed in him as an ABS officer, will not go undetected or unpunished,” the agency said.