Regulators are the biggest source of liability claims on directors’ and officers’ insurance in the Asia-Pacific region, the Australian Professional Indemnity Group conference has heard.

Government agencies have stepped up actions against criminal conduct, according to Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty’s Regional Manager Long-Tail Claims Joerg Ahrens.

“In claims, it is the watchdogs you have to watch out for,” he told the conference in Sydney last week.

Other claims sources include shareholders, liquidators, creditors, employees, customers and competitors.

Crackdowns following the global financial crisis are “prompting knock-on effects to this day. The response by the public is… to ring-fence those perceived excesses, empowering authorities to forego light-touch regulation and to be ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’,” Mr Ahrens said.

In countries such as the US, China and Singapore, clearly “there is a global explosion in regard to directors’ regulatory exposure”.

“We see prominent cases of insider trading in China now,” Mr Ahrens said. “There was little enforcement in the past, with only one case for insider trading over 20 years.”

In 2010 Huang Guangyu, the former chairman of Chinese retail giant GOME Electrical Appliances Holdings, was sentenced to 14 years in prison and fined $US88 million.

In Singapore authorities take a “zero-tolerance” approach to market abuse.

“We see a reflection on the claims side,” Mr Ahrens said. “The criminal sanctions in Singapore for directors and officers are really severe, and can include prison sentences up to 10 years.”

In the US, securities lawsuits against Asian companies fell last year, which is a “fantastic example” of the reach of US statutes.

In May last year 150 investigations were ongoing under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and 1500 open securities inquiries were in the pipeline.

Last year US securities filings fell, with 207 class actions filed in the Federal Court, compared with an average of 221 over the previous five years.

Mr Ahrens says the global market has seen much turmoil in the past 12 years, including the dotcom slide, the attacks of September 11 2001 and the global financial crisis.

“The prognosis goes that loss events of that scale might well keep occurring.”