They allegedly communicated with each other in secret using their BlackBerry mobile phones. But there is no record of contact between alleged insider trading duo Oliver Curtis and John Hartman, a court has heard.
Mr Curtis, husband of Sydney public relations queen Roxy Jacenko, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of insider trading stemming from a deal he allegedly struck in 2007 with Mr Hartman to exploit confidential information to cash in on shifts in share prices.
The NSW Supreme Court has heard the St Ignatius' College, Riverview old boys, then aged in their early 20s, made $1.43 million in a year betting on the sharemarket.
Mr Hartman, the prosecution's star witness, has told the court he passed on tips to Mr Curtis using confidential information he gleaned during his job as an equities dealer at boutique investment firm Orion Asset Management.
He said they covered their tracks by sending messages to each other's BlackBerry mobile phones using a technique similar to emailing or text messaging, known as "PIN-to-PIN messaging".
Mr Curtis had assured him the content of messages would not be stored by telecommunications providers and the only way to access them would be to "pull a satellite out of the sky", Mr Hartman said during a three-day stint in the witness box.
Mr Hartman said he was unsure of the truth of the claim at the time. But on Wednesday, the eighth day of the trial, BlackBerry's manager of public safety operations, Lisa Freer, gave evidence via audio-visual link from Canada that the company did not store any PIN-to-PIN messages.
"Did it keep a record of the actual content of the messages sent?" Crown prosecutor David Staehli, SC, asked of the company's general practice.
"No," Ms Freer said.
She said the company did store metadata, such as the time and date of PIN messages and the identity of the two BlackBerry users.
But Ms Freer said that at the time of the alleged offences "we didn't have any formal retention period for keeping messages".
"Depending on how long after the message was sent, there could be all or some messages left. Potentially messages could have fallen out from the retention, whether they were overwritten or fell off at the end," Ms Freer said.
The court heard BlackBerry was only able to retrieve records for two of Mr Curtis' three phones and neither of Mr Hartman's two devices.
The trial has pitted the former best friends against each other as Mr Curtis' defence team urges the jury to consider if Mr Hartman turned on a "good mate" to reduce his own jail sentence for insider trading.
Mr Hartman served 15 months behind bars after pleading guilty to a string of insider trading offences, most of which related to his own trading. He was released on a good behaviour bond in March 2012.
Mr Hartman also pleaded guilty to a small number of "tipping" offences, saying he had passed on information to Mr Curtis.
But Mr Curtis' barrister Murugan Thangaraj, SC, has pointed out that "the person receiving the tip might be guilty or might not be guilty" of an offence.
Mr Curtis denies entering into an illegal agreement with Mr Hartman to exploit confidential information to cash in on the market.
The trial continues before Justice Lucy McCallum.
