The student yearbook for St Ignatius’ College Riverview’s class of 2003 shows Oliver Curtis as a smiling, spiky-haired teenager, all set to take his first big steps into adulthood.
‘Oli has maintained a balanced lifestyle during his final two years at the college and will long be remembered for introducing the “mullet” to Riverview,’ two of his friends wrote.
John Hartman’s portrait in the same book captures an athletic star debater who excelled at cricket, rugby and beach sprinting, as well as running Riverview’s guest speaker’s forum, the Hot Potato Shop.
‘John has an unusual relationship with his teachers as he often assumes total power over all and at times the teachers ended up in more trouble than John did,’ one of his friends wrote.
Oliver Peter Curtis and John Joseph Hartman were best mates at the Jesuit boarding school on Sydney‘s lower north shore and fiercely followed its motto: ‘As much as you can do, so much dare to do’.
The pair grew up around money. Hartman’s father Keith was obstetrician to the billionaire Packer and Murdoch clans, while Curtis’s father Nick made his fortune in finance and mining rare earths.
Seven years after leaving school, Hartman became at 25 the youngest person to be jailed for insider trading in Australia – a three-year minimum term reduced on appeal to 15 months.
Hartman would have spent more time in custody had he not turned on his insider-trading accomplice Curtis, giving testimony which helped put his old Riverview chum behind bars.
Oliver Curtis (left) and John Hartman (right) were best friends at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview and within four years of leaving school in 2003 had become partners in crime
Oliver Curtis, who is married to PR dynamo Roxy Jacenko, has returned to business success, eight years after walking out of Cooma jail. He is pictured with Jacenko while facing trial
Today, Hartman is CEO of multibillionaires Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s private investment group Tattarang, responsible for managing assets worth more than $25billion.
He is CEO of the Forrests’ Minderoo Foundation – Australia’s largest charitable fund – and chairman of the iconic Forrest-owned bootmaking company R.M. Williams.
Hartman is also chairman of Wyloo, the Forrests’ private mining company, and director of Squadron Energy, the family’s private renewable generation group.
Curtis, who is married to PR dynamo Roxy Jacenko, has made his own remarkable return to business success, eight years after walking out of Cooma Correctional Centre in southern NSW.
It was recently reported that artificial intelligence start-up Firmus Technologies, which Curtis co-founded and co-chairs, had tripled its valuation to $6billion in the past two months.
Curtis and Hartman, both now 40, do not appear to have spoken on the public record about each other since their court cases.
Daily Mail made attempts last week to contact both men to ask whether the animosity so evident during Curtis’ trial had eased in the near-decade since.
In a sign that wounds remain, each declined to comment. However, Jacenko said she was ‘endlessly proud’ of her husband’s achievements since his release.
Hartman, pictured outside court, became at 25 the youngest person to be jailed for insider trading in Australia – a three-year minimum term reduced on appeal to 15 months
Curtis first attended Riverview in sixth class and Hartman one year later. Sometime after the Mosman neighbours came together in Year 7, they became inseparable.
Their final yearbook suggests that of the two, Curtis was more laid-back: ‘He has excelled in all aspects of co-curricular and curricular activities owing his success to the quiet study atmosphere of the beach.’
‘Oli has always been a day boy at heart and left boarding in Year 12 when he realised he had the best car in the year to drive to school.’
After graduating, Hartman enrolled in a Bachelor of Economics at Sydney University, and in March 2006 began work as an equities dealer with Orion Asset Management aged 20. He lied to his employer about having already completed his studies.
Hartman’s job involved placing orders to buy shares worth millions of dollars through stockbrokers on behalf of Orion’s clients.
Curtis, once a Cleo Bachelor of the Year finalist, got part-way through a degree before moving into investment banking as a junior financier with Transocean Securities.
He and Hartman caught up two or three times a week, dining out, sharing beers, playing squash and frequenting The Star casino. Both were heavy gamblers and, fatefully, they liked to chat about the stock market.
Courts would later hear Curtis used confidential information provided by Hartman on 45 occasions between May 2007 and June 2008 to illegally trade on shifts in share prices. Hartman provided tips and Curtis dealt with a stockbroker.
Curtis, pictured leaving Cooma jail, co-founded and co-chairs artificial intelligence business Firmus Technologies, which has tripled its valuation to $6billion in the past two months
These trades resulted in a total net profit of $1,432,228.85, some of which was spent on a $19,380 black Ducati Sports motorcycle and a $72,000 dark silver Mini Cooper S convertible for Hartman.
Curtis paid a full year’s rent of $156,000 in early 2008 when he and his then-girlfriend, socialite Hermione Underwood, moved into a luxury apartment facing Bondi Icebergs along with Hartman.
More cash was outlaid on a holiday to the U.S. and Canada, which included a helicopter ride from the Whistler ski resort to Vancouver and a trip to the Spearmint Rhino strip joint in Las Vegas.
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission caught up with Hartman first and he co-operated with investigators, agreeing to give evidence against Curtis in return for a 10 per cent sentence discount.
After confessing to the financial services regulator, Hartman sought treatment for his gambling problems and spent two years working wage-free five days a week at an inner-city soup kitchen.
Hartman pleaded guilty in the NSW Supreme Court to 19 counts of insider trading and six offences of ‘tipping’ inside information to Curtis. He was jailed in December 2010, six months after meeting his future wife, Alice Clarke.
Hartman did almost all his time in the minimum-security Dawn de Loas Correctional Centre at Silverwater where he was a clerk in the library, earning $25 a week.
After his release in March 2012 – 10 days before Curtis married Jacenko in a $250,000 wedding – Hartman moved to Perth with Clarke. Three months later, Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest gave him a job.
Hartman is CEO of Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s private investment group Tattarang, with more than $35billion of assets under his control. He is pictured with wife Alice and their three sons
Hartman met wife Alice six months before he was jailed in December 2010. She stood by him and they married upon his release (above, on their wedding day)
Forrest, whose principal business was Fortescue Metals Group, saw something exceptional in Hartman and made him chief investment officer of Tattarang and the Minderoo Foundation.
The mining magnate once said of his young protégé: ‘If someone’s paid their due to society, society needs to forgive them and move on.’
Hartman had been out of jail four years when he gave evidence against Curtis at his Supreme Court trial in May 2016. Curtis had pleaded not guilty to one count of conspiring to commit insider trading with Hartman.
Hartman did not return Curtis’s gaze when the defendant glared at him from the dock. He called Curtis a ‘big mouth’ and a ‘show-off’ with a gambling problem, still referring to him as ‘Oli’.
Hartman told the jury he and Curtis knew what they were doing was wrong.
‘We both agreed we would be a lot of s*** if this came out,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t be just one of us.
‘I look back at it now, young 21-year-olds not believing it’s possible to make that sort of money so quickly, so easily,’ he said.
‘It was almost like it was some sort of game.’
Hartman claimed he and Curtis planned to split their insider trading profits 50-50, but Curtis’s barrister Murugan Thangaraj SC told the court: ‘This whole thing of 50-50 – this agreement’s just rubbish.’
‘There’s no dispute the trading took place,’ Mr Thangaraj said. ‘The issue is Mr Hartman’s evidence.
‘Is he honest? Is he reliable? Can we trust him?’
The split between Hartman and Curtis was final and further complicated by the fact Hartman’s older brother Alex was close to Jacenko’s sister, Ruby Davis.
Hartman’s older brother Alex (right) and Roxy Jacenko’s sister Ruby Davis (left) were close. Alex Hartman died suddenly in Switzerland aged 39 in 2019
Alex Hartman, a tech guru who died suddenly aged 39 in Switzerland in 2019, had hired Davis as ‘director of celebrity’ at his now-defunct media company NewZulu.
They remained friends after she left the company and Curtis was facing court.
Curtis was found guilty and in June 2016 spent his first night in prison. A year later he was reunited with Jacenko and their son and daughter.
At the time of his release, reports indicated he had a job waiting for him at his father’s medical technology company.
Then in 2018, his wife appointed him COO of her umbrella of companies, telling Who magazine he had struggled to find work since his release from jail.
By 2019, things were looking up for Curtis. He and Tim Rosenfield founded Firmus with a $250,000 investment, starting as a bitcoin-mining venture before pivoting into AI-focused data centres.
Two months ago, it was revealed that U.S. technology giant Nvidia – the world’s most valuable publicly listed company – and local investment house Ellerston Capital had backed a $330million funding round for Firmus, ahead of a planned public listing.
That valued the Singapore-based business at $1.9billion, a figure which has since risen to $6billion after raising $500million more from investors.
Meanwhile, Hartman, who has three sons, has remained in Perth, where he rose from chief investment officer of Tattarang and the Minderoo Foundation to CEO of both operations in October 2022.
Two years before the Forrests separated in July 2023, Hartman was reportedly ‘as close as anyone, outside family’ to Australia’s then-richest couple.
Hartman acknowledged the debt he owed the Forrests in an interview with the Australian Financial Review in May 2021.
‘After the second chance they gave me, I have complete and undying loyalty to them,’ he said.
‘I never shy away from what happened because it’s made me who I am today. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t gone through it.’
