AMF France v. Mme Chenran Qiu, European TopSoho and others (false or misleading information, 2025)

Judgment entered

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In June 2025 the Commission des sanctions fined a Luxembourg holding company that controlled the fashion group SMCP, its manager, a British Virgin Islands company and SMCP itself a combined EUR 1.72 million. The main finding was a January 2022 press release that misdescribed who stood behind a buyer of SMCP shares, alongside shareholding-disclosure failures.

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

€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 AMF decided the matter on 10 June 2025. The respondents are Chenran Qiu, the class A manager of European TopSoho (ETS), the Luxembourg holding company that controlled SMCP, the owner of the Sandro, Maje, Claudie Pierlot and Fursac brands; Dynamic Treasure Group (DTG), a British Virgin Islands company; and SMCP, listed on Euronext Paris.

The notifications alleged that ETS and Ms Qiu failed to declare in time several crossings of ownership thresholds in SMCP, after a security agent took possession of pledged shares and ETS sold unpledged shares to DTG. They alleged that DTG failed to declare its crossings and its intentions. They further alleged that a press release of 7 January 2022, stating that Ms Qiu was not a shareholder of DTG and did not control it, was false or misleading and capable of fixing the SMCP price at an artificial level. SMCP was charged with posting a results release, with inside information, on its website too early.

The Commission found the declaration failures proved against ETS, Ms Qiu and DTG, and found the 7 January 2022 release proved to be misleading market manipulation by ETS, attributable to Ms Qiu. The decision records that on 22 October 2021 ETS had transferred 12.1 million SMCP shares to DTG for EUR 1, and that Ms Qiu had been DTG's sole shareholder until July 2021. It found that SMCP had failed to keep inside information confidential, but not that it had failed to fix the disruption promptly.

The fines were EUR 1,000,000 on Ms Qiu, 400,000 on ETS, 300,000 on DTG and 20,000 on SMCP, EUR 1,720,000 in total. Publication was ordered without anonymisation.

The record does not show any trading gain, whether any respondent appealed, or any criminal case. ETS has been in judicial liquidation in Luxembourg since 28 February 2023, a fact the decision mentions.

This library tags the matter as misleading issuer disclosure. 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.

• Misleading issuer disclosure — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2025-06-10 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.