Paris (AFP)
The Sanctions Commission of the Financial Markets Authority (AMF) announced on Tuesday that it has imposed a heavy fine of 20 million euros on the US business bank Morgan Stanley for "manipulating the price" of French debt in 2015. , in full crisis of the Greek debt.
The bank expressed "great disappointment" and announced its intention to "appeal", saying that "the activities in question were undertaken in full compliance with market practices", and saying "convinced that they have acted the best interest of the market and its customers ".
The French stockbroker criticizes the trading office of Morgan Stanley in London to have massively bought on June 16, 2015, in the space of fifteen minutes, futures on the French and German debt, to artificially escalate prices French (OAT) and Belgian (OLO) sovereign bonds to sell these immediately afterwards at a better price.
The college of the AMF had required a 25 million euro fine, which would have been a record amount. The highest fine had so far been imposed by the AMF on Natixis AM for 20 million euros.
The Sanctions Committee has estimated that Morgan Stanley's massive acquisition of French debt futures (FOAT) "was intended to influence the price of this financial instrument upwards, with the aim of abnormal and artificial rise in the price of French and Belgian sovereign bonds, the AMF explained in a statement.
Indeed, government bond futures contracts (which allow for the later acquisition of a security at a pre-agreed amount) are financial instruments closely correlated to the government bonds themselves, and these two products generally evolve in the same direction.
Consequently, "the Commission considered that these actions constituted a manipulation of course by resorting to a form of deception or artifice, since the acquisition of FOAT was inconsistent with the overall strategy" of the trading office of the bank "and had the effect of giving other stakeholders a biased image of the state of the market for French sovereign bond instruments," continues the AMF.
© 2019 AFP