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.”
Recently, the AMF has reported progress on the changes it was recommending following the case of the fake press release. But before we look at that, let’s review the story. On 22 November last year, shares in €35 billion French construction firm Vinci dropped by almost 20 percent after a fake press release was posted on Bloomberg as well as other financial sites claiming that company had sacked its CFO, Christian Labeyrie, and would be restating its profits from 2015 and the first half of 2016. The press release, which claimed to be from Vinci, was released a few minutes after 4.00 p.m. Paris time. The fake release claimed that the restatements had come from an internal audit that had found accounting irregularities. Ironically, the release also said that the company had informed the AMF of the misstatements and that net losses should have been booked for both periods amounting to €3.5 billion.
