The fortunate ones: Redemption arc for A-list insider traders

It isn’t quite Shawshank, but the redemption of Australia’s two headline-grabbing society A-listers and once-convicted insider traders has taken another turn.

Remember Oliver Curtis, whose publicist wife, Roxy Jacenko, became a Prada-wearing social media sensation during his trial, as he and his co-accused John Hartman were painted as an allegory of greed, youthful excess and cavalier attitude to wealth?

Well, his financial resurrection has reached Lazarus proportions, courtesy of the latest deliverer of large and fresh fortunes, the artificial intelligence boom, and his investment in Singapore-based Firmus Technologies – which is in the business of keeping data centres cool and helping reduce their carbon footprint.

First taste of freedom: Oliver Curtis leaves Cooma Correctional Centre in June 2017.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Curtis became involved with Firmus in 2019 – three years after walking out of Cooma Correctional Centre in southern NSW – and his $250,000 punt has struck gold (metaphorically speaking), with his stake now valued at $81 million, as reported by The Australian Financial Review.

Meanwhile, Curtis’ partner in crime and former classmate at the elite St Ignatius College, Hartman, also landed on fertile ground having been scooped up three months after his release from prison by Australia’s richest man, iron ore magnate turned environmental evangelist Andrew Forrest.

As Forrest’s right-hand man, Hartman now oversees one of Australia’s largest private fortunes, one with $35 billion in assets under management across agri-food, energy, resources and property.

Forrest, who also employed former National Australia Bank executive Andrew Hagger after he left the bank when the “fees-for-no-service” scandal rocked the industry, has been dubbed the patron saint of second chances.

Andrew and Nicola Forrest with John Hartman.

While many of Forrest’s lieutenants have not survived his particular management style, Hartman has notched up a lengthy tenure and is a Forrest loyalist. And for an executive with such a big job, he maintains a fairly low profile having settled in the west with his young family.

It’s an almighty redemption arc for two individuals who could have faded into obscurity.

The son of wealthy mining executive Nick Curtis, Oliver walked free from a NSW jail having served one year for insider trading after being found guilty of conspiring to commit 45 illicit trades through which the 31-year-old and then-friend Hartman, son of celebrity obstetrician Keith Hartman, swindled $1.43 million.

With Hartman making the most of the chance offered by Forrest, Curtis’ AI-powered financial boon will now capture the public’s attention.

In fact, the world’s thirst for computing power and the resultant wave of growth in data centres is spitting out good fortunes for many.

Just this month, we saw the $24 billion sale of data centre operator AirTrunk – a company created nine years ago by Bangladeshi immigrant and now billionaire Robin Khuda.

While Curtis’ company, Firmus, isn’t quite a big fish like AirTrunk, it’s still swimming in lucrative waters as it combines the two big investment themes of today – energy and technology.

And while Firmus has found some big-name supporters, such as the Pratt family, its road to success has hit potholes. An attempted stock market listing was scuppered during the pandemic when the price of energy-hungry bitcoin fell and the price of energy itself rose.

Firmus got its big break doing a deal with the Singapore government’s ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, which invested $US100 million ($149 million) when rolling out the company’s cooling technology in their 60 data centres last year. That has cut their power consumption in half, according to figures released by the government in Singapore.

And Firmus may yet deliver an even larger fortune to Curtis, with the company’s valuation likely to grow even larger after its next capital raising.

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