AMF France v. A and B (insider dealing, 2011)

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 15 September 2011 the Commission des sanctions found that an employee of the bank advising on Sierra Wireless's friendly takeover bid for Wavecom bought Wavecom shares for relatives before the announcement, and fined him EUR 50,000 with a warning. It put his sister out of the case.

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

€50k

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 second section of the Commission des sanctions of the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) heard the case in public on 15 September 2011 and decided it the same day. The decision is anonymised: the respondents appear as A and B, brother and sister.

Wavecom was listed on Euronext Paris. On 2 December 2008 Sierra Wireless announced a friendly takeover bid at EUR 8.50 a share, about 25 per cent above the last quoted price, after a hostile bid by Gemalto. The AMF opened an investigation after abnormal trading before the announcement. The notifications of grievances, sent in September 2010, alleged that A, who worked for the bank advising on the bid, had used the inside information and passed it to B, and had failed to declare accounts as his employer's rules required. B was charged with using it.

The Commission found that the information became inside information at the latest on 4 November 2008, when the bank prepared an insider list that included A. It found that A had bought 11,449 Wavecom shares for three relatives between 6 and 28 November 2008, and that he accepted having used the information. It also found the use of accounts not declared to his employer to be a professional breach.

It imposed a warning and a EUR 50,000 fine on A, taking into account that he admitted the facts, did not trade on his own accounts and made no direct personal profit. It put B out of the case and ordered anonymised publication.

This record does not show the reasoning on B in detail, whether the decision was appealed, or the profit made by the relatives.

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. 2011-09-15 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.