AMF France v. Sofiro, P, N, O, Q, R, S, T, A, U, V, W and B (insider trading, 2018)

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 14 December 2018 the Commission des sanctions found that eleven people and a company traded LVL Médical shares in April to June 2012 using inside information about the sale of the founding family's majority stake and the follow-on takeover offer. It fined them between EUR 20,000 and EUR 800,000, EUR 1,666,000 in total, and cleared two others of passing the tip on.

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

€1.7m

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 (first section) decided the case on 14 December 2018. The AMF had opened its inquiry into LVL Médical shares in November 2012, and notifications of grievances went to the company Sofiro and twelve individuals in May 2017.

The notifications alleged that each respondent had used, passed on or recommended trades on inside information about the sale of the controlling stake in LVL Médical by the founding family and the simplified takeover bid that would follow. The purchases ran from late April to early June 2012, ranging from about EUR 12,880 to EUR 404,434 per person. The largest was by Q, who was also accused of passing the information to S, his financial adviser at a bank branch. Some respondents were accused of recommending the shares to relatives. A and B were accused only of passing the information on.

The Commission upheld the use-of-information charges against O, N, P, V, Q, R, S, T, U, W and Sofiro, and several charges of recommending or passing on the information, such as against P and T, treating the information as inside information from 27 April 2012. For Sofiro the decision rests on its manager's purchase of 1,269 shares on 7 June 2012 after he heard of a possible deal at a railway station. It rejected the transmission charges against A and B, finding that no plausible route of transmission was shown, and put them out of the case.

The fines were: Q EUR 800,000, W EUR 400,000, R EUR 100,000, O EUR 80,000, T EUR 70,000, V EUR 60,000, P EUR 40,000, S EUR 35,000, Sofiro EUR 35,000, U EUR 26,000 and N EUR 20,000. Publication on the AMF website is for five years, non-anonymised except for A and B.

This record does not show a full chain of who told whom, 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. 2018-12-14 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.