AMF France v. X, A and B (insider trading, 2017)

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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In April 2017 the AMF Commission des sanctions put a firm and its employee out of the case on charges of passing on inside information about an Abertis sale of Eutelsat shares, and fined a fund manager, published as B, 200,000 euros for short-position declaration failures.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

€200k

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 2nd section of the Commission des sanctions decided this case on 21 April 2017. The AMF's inquiry, opened in March 2012, followed suspicious short sales of Eutelsat shares before 12 January 2012, when the market learned that Abertis would sell part of its stake in Eutelsat through an accelerated bookbuild at 27.85 euros a share, a 6.4% discount. On 13 January 14,160,510 Eutelsat shares traded on Euronext against an average of 313,146 a day over the previous three months.

Notifications of grievances were sent on 11 March 2016 to a firm published as X, to A, who worked for it, and to B, a manager of a fund management firm. The AMF alleged that A passed an advice containing the sale information to B in a call on 5 January 2012, that X was responsible for that, and that B used the information when short selling for a fund, Y, the same day. It also alleged that B, as manager of a company Z, was responsible for failures to declare short positions on 9 and 13 January and 11 May 2012.

The Commission ordered the transcript and recording of A's interview in London in September 2014 struck from the record and put X and A out of the case. It found that it was not shown that the sale price or timing was defined with enough precision by 5 January 2012 for the information to be inside information. It sanctioned B, as manager of Z, only for the short-position declaration failures, with a financial penalty of 200,000 euros, and ordered anonymised publication.

The record does not show whether the insider-dealing allegation was dismissed in terms against B, since the document states the penalty only for the declaration failures, and it does not show whether the decision was appealed.

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. 2017-04-21 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.