AMF France v. X, A and B (insider trading, 2005)

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 14 April 2005 the AMF Commission des sanctions found that company X and its chairman A had deliberately hidden its worsening short-term debt position from the public, and that director B had sold shares for himself and his family before that was disclosed. It fined X EUR 200,000, A EUR 150,000 and B EUR 5,000.

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

€355k

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 second section of the Commission des sanctions of the AMF decided the matter on 14 April 2005 after a hearing on 31 March 2005. Grievances had been notified on 21 July 2004 to listed company X, to A (its management-board chairman from mid-2002 and then chairman of the board) and to B, a director from 20 September 2002 to 17 January 2003.

The notices alleged misleading communication about X's debt, a financing agreement of 30 September 2002 tied to the sale of a subsidiary, and, against B, use of inside information when he sold X shares for himself and relatives while a director.

The Commission upheld three breaches of the public-information rules against X and A, which it described as a deliberate effort to conceal the deterioration of the group's financial position through growing short-term debt, with the effect of misleading the public. It did not uphold a further breach concerning a stated return-to-profit objective, which had been presented as an objective rather than a forecast. As to B, it found that he knew from board meetings in September and November 2002 about the near-total use of short-term bank lines, their repayment date, the pledge of shares in a German subsidiary and the terms of a subsidiary sale he thought damaging, none of which was public. He sold his own and family holdings on 12 December 2002 and 9 and 10 January 2003 (avoiding losses it put at about EUR 7,500 for him and EUR 6,700 for the family) and the Commission treated that as insider dealing. It gave him the benefit of the doubt for sales on 21 and 22 January 2003, after he resigned and after the lender's support was withdrawn.

The Commission fined B EUR 5,000, given the few shares involved and his efforts for minority shareholders, A EUR 150,000 and X EUR 200,000, and ordered publication.

The record does not show the losses avoided by other investors or the detail of the debt figures, and the decision does not say whether it was later reformed or annulled on appeal. The AMF anonymised the respondents as X, A and B.

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. 2005-04-14 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.