I've long been intrigued by the techniques used by big market...

I've long been intrigued by the techniques used by big market players to manipulate the market to their favour, or at least to try to do so. I've never gotten to the point that I understood the detail of the trading patterns, but still study these 'change of interest' announcements in the hope of gleaning something that will inform for the future.
This particular notice is a beauty and contains lots that I hope others can illuminate for me. Some things I note:

a) The party has increased their SYR holding by over 4.3 million shares over the period but there are roughly as many Sell trades as there are Buys. I did a rough count of the first two pages and came up with Buys = 108 and Sells = 124
- Daily trades show silly little buy/sells that are clearly market manipulations. I would expect an 'accumulator' to place lots of small Sells then come in with big Buys, but often it doesn't seem that way. Does anyone have a good resource/explanation for the detailed trading techniques used?
- The small trades annoy the cr#p out of me. The ASX should impose a charge on individual trades in the same way as my brokers do to me. If they want to play with little numbers to fiddle the price then okay, but pay a price for doing so. At the moment it is an uneven playing field.

b) The announcement includes shorting activity details (Borrowed/Returned), but I don't understand them. The volumes seem to large and the patterns are confusing. For example on the 16th & 17th of Apr 2013 there were 3.3m shares borrowed then returned. Many questions around the patterns, volumes, different entities and prices for all of these trades. Does anyone fully understand them and can they point to some resource that will assist an understanding? i.e. An expose of dirty trading secrets rather than a generic shorting theory explanation.

With the price movement of SYR over the past year I would have expected any entity playing with shorting would have taken a bath, but I cannot understand the data enough to support this. Perhaps the shorts have all been covered by longs?

My only firm conclusion is that they are all b#stards trying to take my money off me!

All illuminating information gratefully accepted.