AMF France v. A, B (insider trading, 2010)

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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In June 2010 the AMF's Commission des sanctions fined an individual 100,000 euros for selling shares in a French bank in August 2007 while knowing how differently its subprime-related CDO losses came out under two valuation methods. It cleared a second individual who had sold 1.76 million shares in the following months.

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

€100k

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 Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF, France) heard the case on 10 June 2010 and decided the same day. The charges had been notified in July 2009 to two individuals, A and B, linked to a French bank, X, that suffered losses on US subprime-related securitisations from the first half of 2007.

The notifications alleged that A sold 6,000 bank shares on 21 August 2007 knowing that the estimated potential losses on five super-senior CDO tranches varied greatly between the ABX-index method and the bank's internal credit model, which did not account for illiquidity. They alleged that B, between 19 December 2007 and 18 January 2008, had 1,758,700 bank shares sold on his instructions, 1,350,000 of them for his own account, while possibly holding three separate pieces of inside information: an estimated 700 million euro collateral-call risk on CDOs hedged with monoline insurers, a rescue arrangement for the group's money-market funds, and the adoption of the internal valuation model.

The Commission found the charge made out against A and imposed a financial penalty of 100,000 euros. For B it examined each of the three pieces of information and held none of them to be precise inside information he was shown to have known and used (for example, it was not established that he had been told the new model ignored illiquidity), so it put him out of the case.

This record does not show the amount A avoided losing, A's role beyond what the decision states, whether the decision was appealed, or the identity of the bank, which is anonymised. A clearance of B is a finding that the evidence did not establish the breach.

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. 2010-06-10 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.