Neither of them knew it, but police were listening to those November 2015 phone calls. French authorities had been seeking evidence in a sprawling inquiry into suspicious trades in more than a dozen securities, including ad agency Publicis Groupe, automaker Peugeot, and cement producer Lafarge.
The investigation, France’s biggest-ever probe of insider trading, marks a major departure in a country where the offense has typically been dealt with as if it were a civil violation. With a handful of exceptions, authorities haven’t aggressively pursued such cases and have had scant success when they’ve taken them to court.
via Banker’s Phone Tapped in French Crackdown on Insider Trading – Bloomberg.
