False Vinci press release: definitive condemnation for the Bloomberg agency

Sanctioned at the end of 2019 by the AMF, the French stock market watchdog, to the tune of 5 million euros, since reduced to 3 million euros in 2021 by the Paris Court of Appeal, Bloomberg is definitively condemned for having, in November 2016, published erroneous information by relaying the content of a false press release concerning the French construction group Vinci.

“The press agency did not act in compliance with the rules of its profession since it should have, before broadcasting its press release, questioned the authenticity of the information received,” explains the Court of Cassation in a press release to justify its stop.

The court notes that the American agency "did not take any advantage from this broadcast nor acted with the intention of misleading the market", but should have "carried out checks, in the presence of unusual content on the form and unlikely in substance".

Freedom of press

In its appeal, the Bloomberg agency contested both the sanction itself and its amount. On Wednesday, the Court of Cassation rejected these two complaints.

The ruling of the supreme court constitutes an important case law concerning the conciliation between the fight against market abuse and freedom of the press.

“Journalistic information relating to the financial situation of listed companies and intended for investors does not, in a democratic society, have the same importance as journalistic information relating to subjects of general or historical interest or of great media interest” , details the Court of Cassation in its judgment.

Which justifies, according to the court, that freedom of the press can be "further restricted", when "journalistic activity is aimed at the investor public".

To deliver its judgment, the Court of Cassation relied largely on Article 21 of the European regulation on market abuse, which provides that in the event of market abuse linked to the dissemination of information for journalistic, the dissemination of this information must be “assessed taking into account the rules governing freedom of the press”.

But this article provides for several exceptions, in particular if the journalist or his relatives derive "directly or indirectly, an advantage or profit from the disclosure or dissemination of the information in question" on the one hand; whether the dissemination of information takes place "to mislead the market".

For the Court, the information was disseminated without the journalist taking any advantage or intending to mislead the market, but he did not respect "the rules of his profession", explains- she said in her press release.

Fraudsters never found

Bloomberg deleted the report less than ten minutes later, then broadcast a new report, which denied the information.

But this very short period of time was enough to cause the Vinci share price to plunge by 18,28%, before it recovered to close down 3,78%.

The damage was estimated by the AMF at 6,5 million euros for investors.

Vinci had published an official denial on its website a little less than an hour after the first dispatch and announced to file a complaint against X the next day.

Neither the AMF nor the National Financial Prosecutor's Office contacted by Vinci were able to identify the authors of the false press release who had put it online on a group mirror site (vinci.group) imitating the real one (vinci.com), pushing the vice until signing it with the name of the real person in charge of the press relations of Vinci, by referring to a false phone number.

Three other press agencies including the German DPA, the British Reuters, the American Dow Jones and the newspaper Les Echos were trapped. Bloomberg is the only media to pay the price.