AMF France v. A, B and C (insider trading, 2004)

Judgment entered

✓ Checked against the primary document on October 5, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, in a single reading of the French decision; an independent second reading of 60 of the AMF records agreed on every field for 54 and on the core fields for 59. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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On 6 December 2004 the AMF Commission des sanctions found that B, head of a company listed on the Nouveau Marché, had sold shares before its profit warning of 29 January 2002 while knowing its position was worse than announced, and had put out misleading statements. It fined B EUR 100,000 and cleared A and C of insider dealing and misleading information.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

€100k

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars. This regulator states penalties in EUR. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

The first section of the Commission des sanctions of the AMF decided the matter on 6 December 2004. Grievances had been notified on 2 February 2004 to three individuals connected with company X, a distributor of telecom products and services listed on the Nouveau Marché of Euronext Paris: A (a sales director), B (chief executive for most of the period) and C (a former management-board chairman and director).

A was charged with insider dealing, having had a relative sell shares on his behalf. B and C were charged with insider dealing and, as corporate officers, with giving inaccurate and misleading information and failing to prepare the registration document required for Nouveau Marché issuers.

The Commission found against B on two points. It held that his company's press releases of 23 August 2001 (restated turnover and a profit that he himself admitted should not have been positive) and 28 November 2001 (objectives maintained while second-quarter sales had fallen about 30 per cent and a board meeting had just reviewed serious difficulties) were misleading, and that the introduction prospectus left out his intention to pass half his shares to A. It also held that B's sales of 126,283 shares between 12 June and 24 October 2001 and of 29,000 shares between 28 December 2001 and 7 January 2002, before the 29 January 2002 profit warning, used inside information; it put the profit at about EUR 35,500. It rejected a charge about a claim that the company's subsidiary was the leader in online photo services, and the registration-document charge as to B.

It cleared A, because no precise inside information was shown to have been held by a salaried sales director before November 2001, and C, because it was not shown that he took part in the misleading release or knew of the difficulties before the board meeting of 15 November 2001. B received a financial penalty of EUR 100,000.

The record does not show how the Commission weighed the fine between the misleading-information and insider findings, and the decision does not say whether it was later reformed or annulled on appeal. The AMF anonymised the respondents as A, B and C.

This library tags the matter as insider trading. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the decision.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Insider trading — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2004-12-06 Commission des sanctions decision

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• AMF decision page
• Decision (PDF, French)

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added October 5, 2026. submit a correction.