AMF France v. A (insider trading, 2017)

Judgment entered

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On 18 December 2017 the Commission des sanctions found that a credit analyst at a rating agency traded Vallourec shares through his mother's account on three occasions in 2013 to 2015 while holding non-public information about the company's results, and fined him EUR 90,000.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€90k

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 (second section) decided the case on 18 December 2017, after a hearing on 13 December. The AMF had opened an inquiry into Vallourec shares in April 2015, and the notification of grievances went to the individual in February 2017. The decision records that the national financial prosecutor had told the AMF in January 2017 that it did not intend to start a criminal prosecution of him.

The grievances alleged three episodes of dealing in Vallourec shares from a securities account in his mother's name while he held inside information: buying 1,820 shares on 30 July 2013 and selling them the next day, ahead of the half-year results; selling 5,000 shares on 26 February 2014, around the full-year results; and selling 7,510 shares on 21 and 23 April 2015, before bad half-year results and a plan to cut about 2,000 posts were published.

The Commission found all three breaches made out. It held that he had access to the information through his job as a credit analyst at a rating agency, that he gave the orders on the account himself, and that he had told investigators he bought in July 2013 on the basis of results not yet public. It treated it as irrelevant that the February 2014 sale turned out to lose money, and rejected his explanation for the 2015 sale (taking his losses after a sanction in Belgium).

It fined him EUR 90,000 and ordered the decision published on the AMF website, non-anonymised, for five years. It noted that the AMF could no longer sanction rating-agency staff for professional breaches, so it relied on the general insider-dealing provisions that apply to any person.

This record does not show the profits or losses in total, the Belgian sanction in detail, or 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. 2017-12-18 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.