AMF France v. Company X and A (price manipulation, 2011)

Judgment entered

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On 28 October 2011 the Commission des sanctions found that a fund manager at an investment firm pushed up the price of a thinly traded car-rental company's shares by 41 per cent in one session through a series of rising buy orders, and fined the firm EUR 150,000 and the manager EUR 250,000, with a reprimand for each.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€400k

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 Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) decided the case on 28 October 2011. The decision is anonymised: the investment firm appears as company X, its deputy managing director as A, and the issuer as company Y.

The AMF's market surveillance team had noticed unexplained price jumps in the shares of company Y, a thinly traded stock listed on NYSE Euronext Paris, with a free float of about 13 per cent. An investigation opened in December 2009 found that funds run by company X and A were the main buyers on the high-volume days. The notifications of grievances, sent in November 2010, alleged price manipulation on 26 June 2009, when A bought 9,637 shares for a fund he managed against an average of about 85 shares a day that year.

The Commission found that A had instructed a series of buy orders at steadily rising limit prices above the best offer, together with several fixed-price orders that raised the best bid, in three bursts that day. The firm's trades made up almost all of that day's volume, about 120 times the daily average, and the price rose 41.25 per cent, from EUR 8 to EUR 11.30. It found no objective reason for the rise, and recorded calls in which staff discussed avoiding a trading suspension as a sign of intent.

It imposed a reprimand and a EUR 150,000 fine on company X and a reprimand and a EUR 250,000 fine on A, a total of EUR 400,000, stressing that both had been sanctioned before for other breaches, and ordered publication.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed or any profit to the fund. The notice of grievances also referred to buying on other dates; this record concentrates on the 26 June 2009 session.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation. 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.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2011-10-28 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.