AMF France v. X, A, B, C, D, E, F and G (misleading information, 2007)

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 29 March 2007 the AMF Commission des sanctions found that technology-consultancy group X had inflated its 2001 and first-half 2002 revenue with fictitious invoices to be issued and other irregular entries and had given the public inaccurate statements on activity, growth, receivables sales and acquisition payments. It fined X EUR 1.5 million, three executives EUR 1 million each, a fourth EUR 500,000 and two auditors EUR 50,000 each, and cleared E.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€5.1m

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 29 March 2007, three years after the specialised commission of the AMF Board referred it. A COB inquiry opened on 30 September 2002; grievances were notified on 23 and 26 July 2004 to listed group X and seven individuals: A (chairman and chief executive), B, C and D (deputy chief executives), E (finance, then secretary general), and two statutory auditors, F and G. Complementary grievances were sent to A and B in April 2005. The Commission refused to stay the case pending parallel judicial investigations in Paris, from which the prosecutor had sent documents, and set that material aside.

The notices alleged that group X had given the public inaccurate, imprecise and misleading information under the COB rule on public information, mostly about its accounts.

The Commission found that X's revenue at 31 December 2001 and 30 June 2002 was artificially inflated by fictitious entries of invoices to be issued and other irregular accounting entries, and that statements to the public on consultant utilisation rates, revenue and profit growth, sales of trade receivables (the 9 April 2002 release omitted that a EUR 53 million receivables sale lay behind improved working capital, calling the improvement recurring) and earn-out payments for acquired companies were inaccurate or opaque; net income swung from EUR 120.8 million in 2001 to a EUR 109.3 million loss in 2002 on the restated figures. It held the executives A, B, C and D responsible because, in their roles, they knew or should have known. E was cleared. It held the auditors F and G failed to detect at least some irregularities and so certified the 2001 accounts when they should have known the information was inaccurate.

It imposed EUR 1,500,000 on X (the maximum), EUR 1,000,000 each on A, B and D, EUR 500,000 on C (who handled financial communication but was not shown to have taken part in the accounting irregularities) and EUR 50,000 each on F and G, and ordered publication.

A note at the head of the published PDF says the Paris Court of Appeal on 27 May 2008 rejected the appeals of A, B, C, D and X but set aside the findings and penalties against F and G, and that the Court of Cassation on 23 June 2009 rejected the appeals of A, B, C, D and X; the EUR 5,100,000 total here is the sum originally imposed, including F and G's EUR 100,000. The decision does not describe the outcome of the judicial investigations. The AMF anonymised the respondents.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. 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.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2007-03-29 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.