It’s a familiar pattern to anyone who follows compliance news: a public company announces a financial restatement due to accounting irregularities, fires its CFO, expresses an appropriate level of shock and horror, and issues an internal probe to see what happened, all while riding out the inevitable drop in share price and consideration by authorities over whether the matter merits criminal charges. Except, of course, in the case of French construction firm Vinci (pronounced Vancey), that’s not what happened at all. Itself the victim of a fake news release sent to Bloomberg, the company’s resulting (and undeserved) turmoil has instead lead to the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) investigating the case to determine how other companies can avoid Vinci’s fate. Or, as the AMF’s release said with modesty: “at the very least how their market consequences might be limited.”
