Murphy's luck: The lawyer speaks out

Kerry Packer once told his punting chum Chris Murphy "You know nothing about markets. You've got big balls and you are lucky". And as always the Big Fella was right.

God knows what the colourful Sydney lawyer eventually lost in the $630 million collapse of Opes Prime in 2008, but since he ended up owing $118 million to the broking company after his massive share portfolio was liquidated, it was most likely mainly other people's money that went down the gurgler.

Yet, despite the fact that he was playing the stockmarket with borrowed chips, the lawyer turned punter turned massive sharetrader still managed to score a new $300,000 Maserati GranCabrio Sport from Opes as a reward for his frenetic trading.

Yesterday Murphy told a preliminary hearing in the Supreme Court trial of Opes director Julian Smith, "I had lunch with him once at Wildfire [a Sydney restaurant overlooking the Opera House] and they gave me a car, and I think I said, 'thank you'."

Murphy told the court via video link that he had dumped the convertible for a sensible Corolla after it developed a minor mechanical fault that would have cost him $6000 to fix.

But that wasn't the end of his good fortune, for Murphy got even luckier when the value of his share portfolio crashed but no one delivered the margin call that would have put him under. Murphy says he doesn't know why the demand was never made, but the Supreme Court heard last month that Murphy and Opes Prime expected Kerry's son James Packer to bail him out.

And it seems that some money was indeed forthcoming: on Monday the court was told that Murphy did deposit a $10 million letter of credit with Opes Prime, which James had apparently forgotten to sign.

At this stage we don't know whether any of that money disappeared into the Opes black hole. But it seems unlikely. In which case it was James who got lucky.

Murphy wasn't available for comment when The Power Index called this morning.