FCA v. Jean-Noël Yves Alba (2025)

Settled

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In July 2025 the FCA fined Jean-Noël Alba, co-founder and former deputy CEO and chief compliance officer of H2O AM, £1,049,500 and prohibited him from regulated activity for failing to act with integrity and to be open with the regulator. The notice finds he gave the FCA minutes of valuation and risk committee meetings that never took place. He settled early and received a 30 percent discount. It is not a market manipulation case.

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

£1m

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 GBP. 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 Financial Conduct Authority issued this final notice on July 22, 2025. The respondent is Jean-Noël Yves Alba (1 individual, 0 entities), who agreed to resolve the matter and qualified for the 30 percent stage 1 settlement discount from a £1,499,426.57 penalty.

The notice concerns H2O AM LLP, an asset manager whose funds, between 2015 and 2019, made illiquid private investments in 24 entities linked to financier Lars Windhorst, worth an estimated €1.643 billion by August 2020. After a 2019 Financial Times article prompted heavy redemptions, the FCA asked H2O for the internal records behind the valuation of those investments. The notice finds that on August 1, 2019 Alba, as compliance officer, supplied 23 documents presented as contemporaneous minutes of valuation committee meetings and four of risk and compliance committee meetings, when no such formal meetings had taken place, and later made misleading statements to the FCA, breaching the principles on integrity and on openness with the regulator between August 2019 and July 2021.

Alba must pay the £1,049,500 penalty, stored in the native-currency field, and is prohibited from performing any function in regulated activity. An earlier version of this record carried a chat group pump label; the notice involves no manipulation of any price, so no technique tag applies.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above.

Timeline

1. 2025-07-22 FCA final notice

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• FCA final notice

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.