AMF France v. AB Science and others (insider trading, 2022)

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 March 2022 the Commission des sanctions fined a drug developer, a scientific co-founder and a fund manager a combined EUR 1.55 million over advance knowledge of negative regulatory opinions on masitinib. It found illicit disclosure and insider dealing in 2017 and 2018 and a late disclosure by the company, and it cleared the chief executive.

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

€1.6m

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 AMF, first section, decided the matter on 24 March 2022. The respondents are the listed company AB Science, its chief executive Alain Moussy, its co-founder and strategy director Olivier Hermine, and an outside fund manager, Grégory Pépin.

The notifications alleged that the strong likelihood of a negative opinion from the European medicines committee on the masitinib marketing application was inside information, first for mastocytosis from March 2017 and then for ALS from March 2018. They charged the company with late disclosure, Mr Moussy and Mr Pépin with trading, and Mr Hermine with passing the information to Mr Pépin on 20 April 2017 and 22 March 2018.

The Commission held that the first piece of information became inside information on 7 April 2017, not 7 March, and that the company wrongly waited until 17 May 2017 to publish it. It cleared Mr Moussy because his sale of 31 March 2017 came before that date. It found that Mr Hermine had passed the information to Mr Pépin and that Mr Pépin had used it, citing a plausible channel, the timing of his sales on 21 April 2017 and in April 2018, and the absence of a convincing alternative explanation.

The Commission fined AB Science EUR 1,000,000, Mr Hermine EUR 50,000 and Mr Pépin EUR 500,000, and put Mr Moussy out of the case. It ordered publication without anonymisation.

The record does not show the later fate of the marketing application beyond what the decision recites, whether any respondent appealed, or any criminal case. The charge sheet's tests for the 2018 information are not summarised here.

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. 2022-03-24 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.