AMF France v. Infogrames Entertainment and Natexis Bleichroeder (share buy-back and closing-price trading, 2008)

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 16 January 2008 the Commission des sanctions rejected the allegation that Infogrames and its broker had manipulated the closing price by repeated closing-auction purchases of Infogrames' own shares, but fined the company EUR 40,000 for undeclared and inaccurately reported own-share dealings and for trading its shares before a bad-news announcement, and the broker EUR 30,000 for conduct-rule breaches.

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

€70k

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 decided this matter on 16 January 2008, after an investigation opened in March 2004 and notifications of grievances sent on 19 January 2006. The respondents were the game publisher Infogrames Entertainment, its broker Natexis Bleichroeder (now Natixis Securities) and the broker's employee X.

The AMF alleged that between 30 June 2003 and 30 June 2004 Infogrames had bought about 1.95 million of its own shares and sold about 8 million, without a buy-back programme filing, without declarations, and with late public information; that it had bought at the closing fixing on 78 occasions through Natexis to support the price; and that it had dealt while holding non-public information. The broker was also accused of weak information barriers and of re-allocating a 1.2 million-share sale after execution.

The Commission rejected the closing-price manipulation allegation: the purchases were a small fraction of volume, could not by size or indicative price displace prices, and closing prices were on average nearer the day's lows than highs. It found Infogrames had not made the required monthly declarations of its share dealings for nine months, had published an inaccurate account of them on 1 April 2004 that omitted sales covering nearly 3 per cent of its capital, and had breached the duty to abstain from dealing in its own shares between 20 and 26 January 2004, before it announced on 27 January a two-month delay to a major game; it noted that these interventions were very small and almost all purchases, which could not amount to using the information ahead of a price fall. It found Natexis had misused a counterparty account to hold trades for the client, and rejected the chronological-order allegation, and cleared X.

It imposed EUR 40,000 on Infogrames and EUR 30,000 on Natixis Securities as successor to Natexis Bleichroeder (EUR 70,000 in all), and cleared X.

This record does not show that any price manipulation was found.

This library tags the matter as marking the close (alleged; the manipulation allegation was rejected) and insider trading (the abstention breach concerned the issuer's own shares). 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 2 techniques 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.

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

Timeline

1. 2008-01-16 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.