Criminal case for ex-SocGen boss dropped
Jean-Pierre Mustier, Societe Generale’s former head of investment banking, has escaped criminal charges a month after market regulator AMF fined him €100,000 euros (£84,600) for insider trading.
The public prosecutor has dropped its probe into alleged insider trading after a preliminary police inquiry, a spokesman for the prosecutor said yesterday.
“The probe has been closed, with no follow-up, in the last few days,” the prosecutor’s spokesman said. The prosecutor would have had to show criminal intent on Mustier’s part to bring charges. The AMF regulator did not need to show criminal intent to fine Mustier last month.
Both probes centred around Mustier’s sale of 6,000 SocGen shares in late 2007, months before the bank revealed heavy losses on subprime mortgage investments.
The tall, wiry Mustier, who quit his high-profile job at SocGen in 2009 when the AMF began its investigation, had told a Paris court last month during the unrelated Jerome Kerviel trial that the regulator would recommend his acquittal.
The AMF said last month that Mustier should have abstained from selling his shares in 2007 given his responsibility as an “insider” with access to sensitive information about how the bank valued its subprime assets. Both the prosecutor and the AMF cleared non-executive director Robert Day of insider trading over 1.4m shares sold between mid-December 2007 and January 2008.
SocGen revealed subprime losses of €2.1bn on 24 January, 2008, on the same day that it blamed trader Jerome Kerviel for €4.9bn of losses.