AMF France v. A (insider dealing, 2013)

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 17 May 2013 the Commission des sanctions found that a director of Sperian bought its shares on two occasions in spring 2010 using inside information about takeover bids by Cinven and then Honeywell, making an estimated EUR 927,168. It fined him EUR 3.5 million.

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

€3.5m

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 17 May 2013. The decision is anonymised: the respondent appears as A, a director of the listed company Sperian.

The notification of grievances, sent in December 2011, alleged that A used inside information about a planned takeover bid for Sperian by Cinven when he bought 11,532 shares between 2 and 30 March 2010 and sold them between 1 and 16 April, and used inside information about a planned bid by Honeywell when he bought 20,000 shares on 12 to 14 May 2010 and sold them on 20 May. It also alleged that he failed to declare purchases of 32,738 shares and sales of 49,159 shares made between March and May 2010.

The Commission upheld the grievances. It treated the two bids as distinct pieces of inside information and recorded gains estimated at EUR 118,935 on the first and EUR 808,233 on the second, EUR 927,168 in all, a figure A did not contest. It held that his office as director imposed an absolute duty to abstain, and that the breach was committed twice.

It imposed a EUR 3.5 million fine, ordered publication and noted the statutory maximum of ten times the profits.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed, how A learned of the bids, or any criminal proceedings; the text as read here does not mention any.

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. 2013-05-17 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.