(Bloomberg) -- Australia’s securities regulator will establish a new team dedicated to insider trading investigations as it ramps up efforts to crack down on market manipulation.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission will target “pump and dump” schemes, intervene in chat rooms, and review “finfluencer” activity among other things, according to its latest market cleanliness report released on Wednesday. The watchdog said it’s nearly doubled the number of new insider trading investigations in the current financial year compared with last year.
The new structure puts fresh focus on criminal insider trading cases, which require a high evidence bar for getting to prosecution. The specialist squad will be split from a team that currently has a broad remit of policing market misconduct including stock manipulation and corporate disclosure.
On Tuesday, the agency’s prosecution counterpart — the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions — pressed criminal charges based on ASIC’s investigation against an alleged pump-and-dump ring. The case was related to Australian penny stocks run on messaging app Telegram that dated back to the stock market highs of 2021.
“We will continue to invest in data and technology to hunt and detect all forms of market misconduct,” ASIC chair Joe Longo said in the statement. “As our financial landscape evolves we will expand our market cleanliness work to capture private markets and products in the coming year.”
The commission has been under pressure to show greater effectiveness, with a recent parliamentary inquiry run by a federal opposition senator arguing ASIC should be broken up amid allegations its responsibilities are too broad.
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