The Sure Thing · The Australian Financial Review

Ep 2. Moral Seduction

February 28, 2021·34 min·3 clips

From the very first trade, Lucas secretly skimmed a side profit worth $7,700 while splitting the agreed share with Chris — and then built that side hustle to nearly $8 million.

Chris rejects the tidy betrayal story. In the opening, he says people ask whether he hates Lucas, but he does not see it that way. Angus Grigg then resets the case. The first episode had left Christopher Hill and Lucas Kamei at a Mornington Peninsula beach party, where an illegal foreign exchange plan first came up. The target sounded small enough to control. They would make about $200,000 through insider trading, stay quiet, and stop before the scheme drew attention. But Lucas had held something back. On the night of their maiden trade, he had already opened a second shadow account, moving the arrangement away from the bargain Chris thought he had agreed to. The story then turns back. Angus puts Lucas at Monash University, then at Goldman Sachs, where the court heard he felt he had arrived. The picture is split on purpose. Lucas was training inside a famous investment bank while still driving a forklift at Safeway's dispatch warehouse. Status did not wipe away the insecurity the episode keeps circling. Professor Clinton Free describes elite finance culture as risky, especially for someone carrying the feeling that he might not really belong. Then the crisis arrives. In September 2011, after the global financial crisis, Lucas and other Goldman graduates were retrenched under a last in, first out logic. Clinton suggests the layoff may have bruised Lucas's ego and made him more open to a scheme than he otherwise would have been. NAB was still a good landing. But next to Goldman Sachs, the domestic trading floor could feel smaller to someone chasing an elite finance identity. Lucas still did well there. The investigative account describes him as sociable, liked, promoted, and seen as up and coming inside NAB. That is the tension. The episode asks how a rising star, not an obvious outsider, could get close enough to confidence, resentment, and opportunity to start crossing legal lines.

As heard by us

A steady white-collar story about insecurity and the pressure of elite finance.

Episode two treats the insider-trading story as more than a warning label. It looks at insecurity, ambition, and the pressure cooker of elite finance, moving between court facts, expert framing, and Lucas Kamei's own account.

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Why you'd press play

A courtroom-grade look at how a trading-floor friendship turned into insider trading.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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