Sanctions “between 50,000 adn 300,000 euros” have been decided against the mining company Auplata,its former CEO and its former auditor.
The Financial Markets Authority (AMF) on Thursday imposed fines totaling €4.1 million on several defendants in the context of a case of price manipulation and misleading facts about a gold factory project linked to a gold mine in Guyana. The Sanctions Commission decided on the sanctions “between 50,000 and 300,000 euros” against the mining company Auplata, its former CEO Didier Tamagno and the group’s auditor, announced in a press release on Thursday.
Fines “between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 euros” where inflicted against an investment fund,EHGOS,its owner,the company Alpha blue Ocean,and its founder Pierre Vannineuse,accused of manipulating the prices of the group’s securities. These are fines higher than the 3.7 million euros requested by the AMF panel during the hearing at the end of September. In detail, the French company auplata obtained a loan of 60 million euros from the EHGOS fund in 2017 to finance the launch of a gold project in the municipality of Dieu-Merci in Guyana. This loan consisted of convertible bonds. These allow the company to repay its creditor with existing or new shares.
“False or misleading information”
As part of this loan, Auplata, however, never publicly informed investors of a clause according to which the lenders could obtain more shares if the shares were priced below the value registered in the group’s share capital. However, this clause was activated several times during the contract. It thus allowed the creation of numerous new shares, which diluted the price of the securities on the stock markets, to the detriment of other shareholders, without the latter realizing it. “By not describing the mechanism of this clause” (…) Auplata a “spread false or misleading information”therefore estimated the AMF Sanctions Commission.
The EHGOS fund had publicly promised to limit the pace of sales of the shares obtained through this contract to avoid a drop in their price on the markets. He didn’t keep his word either without alerting the markets. This behavior was considered as such by the AMF “constituting a characterized price manipulation”justifying the sanctions. For its part, the auditor Auplata certified the financial statements without detecting any irregularities, which justifies a sanction “dissemination of false or misleading information”.