The corporate watchdog has used the Australian interest rate-rigging scandal to repeat calls for tougher penalties for white collar crime.
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Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft said the regulator had nearly 10 of its 60 market enforcement staff working on the investigation into suspected manipulation of Australia's key benchmark interest rate.
"That's 18 per cent focused on this particular area at the moment," he said. "We are allocating a lot of resources to this area at the moment."
It comes after the ANZ became the first local bank to be embroiled in the scandal – similar to the UK's Libor case – standing down seven traders targeted as part of the ASIC probe last week.
The investigation, which has been running since mid-2012, is looking into potential misconduct in the bank bill swap rate (BBSW) market between 2007 and 2013.
During this time, the rate was set manually among members of a BBSW panel, which includes the big four Australian banks and 10 other large global investment banks.
Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS and French bank BNP Paribas have already been fined for their role in manipulating the rate, but the fines have been small compared with the billions of dollars of fines handed down in the Libor case.
Mr Medcraft said tougher penalties, such as more jail sentences, would deter would-be white-collar criminals.
He said fear had to be lifted in order to "smother the greed".
"White-collar criminals are scared of going to jail. I had 10 years on Wall Street and going to jail is the thing that scares them most," he said.
"When they come up to the 18th floor and they put people in handcuffs and wheel them off they don't come back – it sends a message."
A spokeswoman for ASIC would not say when the regulator would release more details of the long-running investigation.
It is understood ASIC is considering several possible responses to potential serious misconduct, including criminal and civil action, administrative action and "negotiated" action.
In January, BNP Paribas agreed to an enforceable undertaking and a $1 million payment for allegedly manipulating the benchmark rate.
Last December, on the day before Christmas Eve, Swiss bank UBS agreed to an identical arrangement.
As of September 2013, the BBSW rate has been set electronically to reduce the risk of manipulation.
ANZ said last week it was "continuing to co-operate" with the regulator by standing down seven of its traders targeted by the investigation.
"This is a complex issue and ASIC's investigation and ANZ's internal review may not be complete for some time," ANZ chief risk officer Nigel Williams said.
ASIC confirmed it was continuing to investigate ANZ and its individual traders as part of the wider probe into the BBSW submission process and trading in reference bank bills.
The BBSW is Australia's key interest rate benchmark used by banks to lend money to one each other.
The ASIC investigation follows other rate-rigging scandals throughout the globe, including the Libor case, with trillions of dollars in loans affected between banks and customers.
