AMF France v. Auplata Mining Group and others (price manipulation, 2024)

Judgment entered

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In December 2024 the Commission des sanctions fined a gold-mining company, its chief executive, its auditors and a convertible-bond financing fund's managers a combined EUR 4.15 million. It found misleading disclosures about a convertible-bond financing and abusive selling of the shares the financing generated in late 2017.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€4.2m

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 decided the matter on 11 December 2024. The respondents are Auplata Mining Group (AMG), listed on Euronext Growth, and its chairman and chief executive Didier Tamagno; the audit firm RSM Paris and its signing partner Stéphane Marie; and the financing parties European High Growth Opportunities Manco SA, Alpha Blue Ocean Inc and Pierre Vannineuse.

The notifications alleged that a press release of 30 October 2017 and the 2017 consolidated accounts gave false or misleading signals about a financing by convertible bonds, leaving out how conversion indemnities made it costly and more dilutive. They alleged the same of the auditors' report, and that the financing parties manipulated the share price through their selling.

The Commission found the press release, the annex to the 2017 accounts and the auditors' report misleading and held the breaches attributable to Mr Tamagno and Mr Marie. It found the financiers' sales abusive: the fund's daily sales of Auplata shares exceeded the 24 percent limit set in the financing contract on seven of ten sessions analysed between late November and late December 2017, and reached 72.54 percent of daily sales on 27 November 2017. It held that this gave misleading signals about supply and fixed the price at an artificial level.

The fines were EUR 300,000 on Auplata, 50,000 on Mr Tamagno, 200,000 on RSM Paris, 100,000 on Mr Marie, 1,000,000 each on European High Growth Opportunities Manco and Alpha Blue Ocean, and 1,500,000 on Mr Vannineuse. Publication was ordered without anonymisation.

The record does not show the profit made from the sales, whether anyone appealed, or any criminal case.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation, with misleading-disclosure findings that have no separate tag here. 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.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2024-12-11 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.