AMF France v. X, W, Z and Y (insider trading, 2008)

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 4 December 2008 the Commission des sanctions found that two business introducers and two of their friends had traded on, or passed on, inside information about the planned purchase of a casino operator by the listed arcade-games company La Tete dans les Nuages. It imposed penalties of EUR 35,000, EUR 9,000, EUR 10,000 and EUR 10,000.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

—

Total relief

—

Alleged gain

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Penalty as published

€64k

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 decided this matter on 4 December 2008, after an investigation opened in July 2006 and notifications of grievances sent on 18 July 2007. The issuer was La Tete dans les Nuages (LTDN), a small, thinly traded arcade-games operator listed on Euronext. Its owner agreed on 18 January 2006 to buy a casino operator from the Partouche group and another holder, and the deal was only made public on 2 February 2006.

The AMF alleged that X, a business introducer who attended the 12 December 2005 meeting at which the deal took shape, bought 5,500 LTDN shares on 9 and 10 January 2006 and passed the information to his friend W, who bought 2,000 shares; and that Z, another introducer, told his friend Y, who bought 1,230 shares on 12 and 16 January 2006.

The Commission found all four allegations established. X knew the deal was imminent, his buying was sudden and in a share that traded about three times a session, and he told W. Z told Y, whom he had known since childhood and was in property companies with, that there was a stock-market opportunity in LTDN, and Y bought for the first time. It noted potential gains of EUR 12,155 for X, EUR 4,420 for W and EUR 7,941 for Y, and treated Z's communication as particularly serious because he was a professional intermediary.

It imposed EUR 35,000 on X, EUR 10,000 on Z, EUR 10,000 on Y and EUR 9,000 on W (EUR 64,000 in all), with publication in anonymised form.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed. Only X filed observations in reply to the charges.

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. 2008-12-04 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.