AMF France v. Exane, Boussard & Gavaudan, A and B (insider dealing and information-handling failures, 2012)

Judgment entered

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On 14 June 2012 the Commission des sanctions fined the broker Exane EUR 500,000 and warned its chairman for failing to keep an insider list and for mishandling a conflict of interest during a block purchase of Atos shares. It put a hedge fund and its president out of the case on the charge of acting on inside information.

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

€500k

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 14 June 2012. Exane and Boussard & Gavaudan are named; the two individuals appear as A (Exane's chairman) and B (president of Boussard & Gavaudan).

In June 2008 Paribas Affaires Industrielles Partners (PAI), through a subsidiary, asked Exane to buy up to 9 million Atos Origin shares at a maximum of EUR 38 per share, using a reverse book-building technique that sounds out potential sellers. The notifications of grievances alleged six breaches by Exane and A, including the lack of an insider list, weak compliance procedures, undeclared conflicts of interest and unrecorded market soundings. They also alleged that on 19 June 2008 B and his fund had bought Atos shares while holding inside information passed on by an Exane salesman.

The Commission upheld two grievances against Exane and A: that no insider list or information-control procedure was set up although the information on PAI's stake building circulated inside the firm, and that Exane had not detected and managed a conflict of interest and the primacy of its client's interest. It dropped or rejected the rest. On B and Boussard & Gavaudan, it found B had ordered 50,000 Atos shares (28,798 executed) shortly after a call from an Exane salesman, but could not be shown to have known or ought to have known that the information was inside information, and put both out of the case.

It fined Exane EUR 500,000 and gave A a warning, and ordered the decision to be published in named form, at the request of the two cleared respondents.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed, or any profit from the trades. Most of the sanction rests on information-handling and conflict failures, not on a finding of insider dealing.

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. 2012-06-14 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.