AMF France v. Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, Natixis, A, Management company X (insider trading, 2011)

Judgment entered

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In March 2011 the AMF's Commission des sanctions fined two banks, Natixis (500,000 euros) and Crédit Agricole CIB (400,000 euros), and warned both, for breaching the rules on sounding out investors before a Danone bond issue in November 2008. It cleared a fund manager and his management company of using inside information about that issue.

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

€900k

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 Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF, France) decided the case on 17 March 2011. The respondents were Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank (formerly Calyon), Natixis, a credit-analyst fund manager (A) and his management company (X).

On 21 November 2008 Danone decided to issue a 6.375 per cent bond due 2014, with four banks, including Natixis and Calyon, leading the placement. On 24 November 2008 the banks canvassed professional investors on their interest. The notifications alleged that A sold Danone 5.50 per cent May 2015 bonds for the funds he managed after learning that the new issue was being prepared, and that Natixis and Calyon had not applied the AMF's market-sounding rules in the canvass.

The Commission found that A's disposal was not shown to rest on inside information: the funds had been reducing bond holdings since September 2008, he had tried to sell the position as early as 4 September, he placed orders according to the firm's usual procedure, and it was not established that he read a chat message that had circulated the details. It put A and X out of the case. It found the market-sounding breaches made out. Natixis had decided not to apply the rules, judging that the information was not inside information, and Calyon had departed from them for at least some of the soundings. It treated the rules as preventing insider dealing and took the common practice of the industry as only a slight mitigation.

This record does not show whether any investor traded on the soundings, whether the decision was appealed, or how the banks' conduct in each individual call was assessed. The case against the fund manager and his company was not upheld; the sanctions are for the banks' market-sounding failures.

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. 2011-03-17 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.