AMF France v. Allianz Global Investors France, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Y and X (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.

Report an error in this record (amf-fr-san-2012-02-insider-trading-2011) by email

On 24 November 2011 the Commission des sanctions found that a portfolio manager sold Schneider Electric bonds for an Allianz fund after being sounded by Société Générale about a new bond issue, and sanctioned Allianz, the two banks (for breaching the market-sounding rules) and the manager, EUR 1.16 million in total. It put a second manager out of the case and rejected the Saint-Gobain charges.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

—

Disgorgement

—

Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

€1.2m

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) decided the case on 24 November 2011. Allianz Global Investors France (Allianz GI France), BNP Paribas and Société Générale are named; the two portfolio managers appear as X and Y.

The case concerned two corporate bond issues launched in January 2009: Schneider Electric on 7 January and Saint-Gobain on 14 January. Before each launch, the issuer's banks sounded out investors about demand. The notifications of grievances alleged that the information passed to investors was inside information, that the banks had not followed the AMF's market-sounding rules, and that Allianz GI France managers had sold existing bonds of the same issuers on the strength of it.

On Schneider, the Commission found that X, who manages a fund at Allianz GI France, was sounded by a Société Générale salesman on 5 January 2009 and on 6 January sold EUR 600,000 of Schneider's 5.375% 2015 bonds for the fund, in breach of the duty to abstain. The price of those bonds fell by 1.9 per cent when the issue was announced. It held that Société Générale had wrongly treated the sounding as a soft sounding and so had not followed the formal sounding procedure, and made similar findings against BNP Paribas on Saint-Gobain.

On Saint-Gobain, the Commission did not find that Y, who sold EUR 3 million of bonds on 12 January 2009, held the information, noting that the sale followed a plan taken on 8 January. It put Y out of the case and dropped that charge against Allianz GI France. It rejected the charge that the banks should have put the new bonds on their watch lists.

It fined BNP Paribas and Société Générale EUR 500,000 each, Allianz GI France EUR 150,000 and X EUR 10,000, all with warnings: EUR 1,160,000 in total.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed. The bond trades were over the counter, and the record does not show any profit.

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. 2011-11-24 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.