Ethics in Banking and Finance

Case Study: The Story of Lukas Kamay and Christopher Hill

Introduction
Lukas Kamay was an achievement oriented person with high intelligence as well as strong working skill and capacity. The man was so eager to be succeed, especially after being unemployed because of the restructure of Goldman Sachs, which was regarded as a great failure in his life. He started his next work as an analyst in NAB, and started to attract the attention of the manager quickly, then became the associate director within only two years with the responsibility of overseeing a budget that more than $15 million. NAB had a strong confidence as well as high expectation in Kamay, and consumed a large amount of input on him. Due to NAB’s culture of succeeding, winning and achieving without regarding for morality and ethics when making money within the bank, Kamay was motivated by his greed and became the ringleader of the an insider trading with the assistance of his friend, Christopher Hill.
Christopher Hill was one of Kamay’s friends in the university who was working in the Australia Bureau of Statistics. Since he had the access to plenty of secret market information, Kamay persuaded him to use that embargoed data into the margin foreign exchange contract trading to make cash, and Hill accepted the idea willingly. Since then, they started to trade before the ABS announcements were leased.
Initially, they planned to put only a small amount of money to avoid the risk of being caught. However, Kamay cannot stop this behavior after realizing how easy the trade was to make profits, and earned more than $7 million in profit while gave Hill less than $20,000 for his efforts. Finally, the illegal trading was uncovered by relevant authorities due to its large scale, then Kamay and Hill were sent to jail.
Discussion of Kamay and Hill’s Behavior of Insider Trading
According to the definition, insider trading is to make use of the undisclosed information to obtain an unfair advantage over the outsiders...