AMF France v. X and A (price manipulation alleged; record-keeping breach found, 2006)

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 26 January 2006 the AMF Commission des sanctions rejected the charge that portfolio manager X and its manager A had manipulated the price of a stock by firing sell orders before buying a block from a bank, saying there was no legal basis and no proof of intent to mislead. It fined X EUR 40,000 for breaking order-trail rules and cleared A.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

—

Penalty as published

€40k

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 second section of the Commission des sanctions of the AMF decided the matter on 26 January 2006. An AMF inspection of X, an order-transmission and discretionary management firm, followed a market member's behaviour that tightened the order-book spread before a block trade; the specialised commission sent grievances to X and its manager A after its meeting of 15 March 2005.

The notices alleged that on 5 January 2004, while negotiating to buy a significant block of Camaieu shares from a bank, X and A manipulated the price by having sell orders fired in bursts into the central order book to push the seller to a lower price; that a similar burst of sell orders preceded a 15,000-share April Group block purchase on 6 November 2003; and several record-keeping and reallocation failures.

The Commission rejected the manipulation charge on Camaieu for want of an explicit legal basis prohibiting those sales and for lack of convincing evidence that A meant to mislead the counterparty. It set aside the April Group charge because it did not say when the orders were given or whether they coincided with the purchase, which deprived the defence of a fair chance. It found that X netted purchases against sales in fund records (1,618 Camaieu shares bought against 280 sold) and did not systematically record orders in the manager's log, which broke the audit-trail rule; it rejected the charge of after-the-fact reallocations.

It cleared A and gave X a warning and a EUR 40,000 financial penalty for the audit-trail failure, which hampered the regulator's controls, and ordered publication.

The record shows no finding of price manipulation: the sanction concerns record-keeping only. The decision does not say whether it was later reformed or annulled on appeal. The AMF anonymised the respondents; the text names the stocks.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation (alleged conduct; the manipulation charge was rejected and the penalty was for record-keeping failures). 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. 2006-01-26 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.