They will have seven years on the accused bench. Seven financiers were brought to the Paris Criminal Court in February, accused of a crime of extraordinary initiation, disputed by six of them, with almost twenty million euros that would have been obtained, it was learned from a source close to the file on Wednesday.
The defendants are summoned on February 4, 5, 9 and 11, 2026, according to the reference order of which AFP was aware, confirming information from the Bloomberg Agency.
At the heart of the case is Stéphane F., 55, who worked at Société Générale at the time, the only ones to recognize the facts. It is he who became aware in November 2015 of confidential documents regarding the imminent acquisition of the American company Airgas by its French rival Air Liquide, a blow on the Gas Industrial chessboard. The Air Liquide producer of French Industrial Gas had bought dollars (12.5 billion euros) for $13.4 billion) its US streamlined rivals at the time.
This secret is worth gold: purchasing the securities in question before the transaction is official would guarantee an insider’s informed information of large capital gains on resale. The latter would have purchased products derived from Airgas Action, which would have allowed it to pocket a capital gain of 8 million euros.
The point had revealed in 2017 that the banker aware of the indiscretion had informed a hairdressing friend that he himself had entrusted this information to a Geneva financier.
Requested by AFP, his lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski declined to comment.
The cumulative capital gains of the accused, suspected of having benefited from this inside information, would amount to 21 million euros at the end of the investigation, even if the reference order mentions “at least” a dozen million, an estimate at the beginning of the judicial investigation.
The capital gain is therefore estimated between 9 and 12 million euros for Lucien S., 62, another main defendant, also sentenced in 2021 to three years of suspended prison for tables in the sale of a VAR wine domain. AFP was unable to join his lawyer, Francis Teitgen.
Source: BFM TV
