Who the Hell is Hamish? · The Australian

Who the Hell is Phil?

·42 min·3 clips

Hamish Watson convinced his girlfriend he accidentally killed his twin brother Phil—a lie so elaborate it unraveled at a family barbecue.

The floor was where Hamish learned the act. In the mid-1990s, he turned up on the Sydney Futures Exchange, a place where private-school confidence and risky bets set the mood. He talked big and traded small. The narrator paints him as a one-trade Charlie who got mocked, but still came away with something useful: the language of wealth, risk, and authority. That language gave his lying a sharper outfit. Once Hamish could sound like an investment insider, the pitch got harder to dismiss. The trouble later reached court. Adelaide businessman Adrian Van Diemen sued to recover $3 million, and the case settled in 2005. Jan described the strain on her husband as extremely stressful, and he suffered a heart attack afterward. ASIC also stepped in, banning Hamish from trading for three years in 2003. It did not seem to slow much down. Greg Medcraft's later warning that Australia was a paradise for white-collar crooks hangs over the segment. Elizabeth Sexton then widens the story. As a Sydney Morning Herald writer in the early 2000s, she dug into the collapse of Hart's and the strange arithmetic behind its public float. The company raised $30 million. Seventeen months later, the money was gone, with a $93 million loss announced for the year to June. Sexton's question lands hard: how did a company raise public money in May 2000, warn of losses by January 2001, and reveal a much larger hole by September? Steve Hart becomes another warning from the same world Hamish learned to use, where confidence and complexity leave investors exposed.

As heard by us

A conman story built from markets, bravado, and patient reporting.

Who the Hell is Hamish? tracks Hamish Watson from the Sydney Futures Exchange, where he was dismissed as a small-time trader with big talk, into the broader con that those rooms helped prepare him to run.

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