AMF France v. S, U, V, W and X (insider trading, 2006)

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 23 November 2006 the AMF Commission des sanctions found that asset manager V had sold shares of company Y on 12 December 2002 on inside information about a planned bond issue gleaned from bank S's market sounding. It fined V EUR 1,200,000, gave bank S a warning and EUR 300,000 for faulty sounding records, and cleared managers U, W and X.

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

€1.5m

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 Commission des sanctions of the AMF decided the matter on 23 November 2006 after a hearing that day. Grievances had been notified on 23 December 2004 to bank S, and asset managers U, V, W and X. On 6 December 2002 company Y, listed on Euronext Paris, had asked bank S's London branch to prepare an issue of mandatorily redeemable bonds, and the bank sounded out investors before the public announcement.

The managers were charged with using inside information about the planned issue, and the bank with failing to keep a proper log of the soundings.

The Commission held that U, V and W had received the privileged information in the soundings. It held U and W traded only after it had ceased to be inside information, so they had not used it; that X was not shown to have been told it and had other explanations for its trading; and that V, through a manager E who sold a notably large number of Y shares on 12 December 2002 between 10:00 and 17:12 before the announcement, had used it. For the bank, it found the list of calls omitted times and sometimes dates or gave wrong dates, breaching the conduct rule on market soundings.

It fined V EUR 1,200,000, gave S a warning and EUR 300,000, cleared U, W and X, and ordered publication.

The record does not show the profit or loss avoided by V, and the sanction on S concerns record-keeping, not trading. The decision does not say whether it was later reformed or annulled on appeal. The AMF anonymised the respondents.

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. 2006-11-23 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.