AMF France v. Bricorama SA, C, A, B and firm X (misleading financial information, 2012)

Judgment entered

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On 29 June 2012 the Commission des sanctions fined a listed DIY retailer EUR 40,000 and its chief executive EUR 10,000 for annual accounts that left out lease and related-party disclosures required by accounting standards, and for omitting the auditors' report from a financial report. It cleared the two auditors and their firm.

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

€50k

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 first section of the Commission des sanctions of the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) decided the case on 29 June 2012. Bricorama SA is named; its chief executive appears as C, and the two statutory auditors and their firm as A, B and X.

After complaints from a minority shareholder, the AMF opened an investigation in December 2009 into Bricorama's financial information from the end of 2006. The notifications of grievances, sent in March 2011, alleged that the group's consolidated accounts and annual reports for 2006 to 2008 gave incomplete or inexact information on its lease commitments and related parties, in breach of the rule that information given to the public must be accurate, precise and sincere. They alleged that the auditors had communicated inexact information by certifying those accounts without reservation, and that the 2007 auditors' report was missing from the financial report.

The Commission found that the accounts gave no figures on lease commitments, which the company published only on 25 August 2009, and that the related-party information was incomplete for the three years, to the detriment of the public's understanding of rents paid to property companies linked to C. It also found that Bricorama had not included the auditors' report in the 2007 financial report or put it on its website. It held that the auditors' certifications, in themselves, did not breach the rules and put A, B and firm X out of the case.

It fined Bricorama EUR 40,000 and C EUR 10,000, a total of EUR 50,000, taking into account the company's voluntary corrections and the limited size of some omissions, and ordered publication in a form keeping the cleared persons anonymous.

This record does not show whether the decision was appealed. The Commission found incomplete rather than deliberately false information, and this is an issuer disclosure case, not a case of price manipulation. The library has no matching technique, so none is tagged.

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. 2012-06-29 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.