AMF France v. A and B (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 18 October 2013 the full Commission des sanctions found that a bank employee passed word of SNCF Participations' planned takeover bid for GEODIS to his cousin, who bought shares and contracts for difference worth about EUR 8 million for a gain of EUR 6.2 million. It fined the cousin EUR 14 million and the employee EUR 400,000.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€14.4m

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 Commission des sanctions of the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), sitting in plenary formation, decided the case on 18 October 2013, after it had deferred its ruling on these two respondents in its decision of 12 April 2013 (SAN-2013-10) to allow further investigation. The respondents are anonymised as A and B, and the letters differ from those used in that earlier decision.

On 6 April 2008 SNCF Participations announced a friendly takeover bid for GEODIS at EUR 135 a share, a premium of nearly 33 per cent. The notifications of grievances alleged that B, a managing director at a bank co-presenting the bid, passed the inside information to his cousin A, and that A used it by acquiring 6,500 shares and 101,287 contracts for difference (CFDs) on GEODIS between 20 March and 4 April 2008, for a total of EUR 8,000,224.

In his written answer, A said for the first time that he had placed seven unexecuted buy orders for CFDs between 28 February and 18 March 2008, which he used to explain his interest. The rapporteur asked the Danish, British and Lebanese regulators and the banks concerned for evidence. The Commission found that nothing in the records showed any such earlier orders reaching the brokers and that the explanation was implausible, and upheld the grievance against both.

It fined A EUR 14 million, on a gain it put at EUR 6,248,593, and B EUR 400,000, EUR 14.4 million in total, and ordered publication.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed or whether the amounts were reduced. A related earlier decision concerning another person in the same case is recorded separately.

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. 2013-10-18 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.