Paris - Some 100 shareholders of the troubled French bank Societe Generale filed a suit on Monday for insider trading after it was reported that a member of the bank's board of directors had sold millions of its shares before a massive fraud was made public, French media reported. The suit was filed after the French stock market watchdog AMF said that Robert A Day had sold 85.7 million euros (129 million dollars) worth of Societe Generale shares on January 9, at 95.27 euros per share.
Since then, the bank's shares have lost more than 25 per cent of their value. At mid-afternoon Monday, one share of Societe Generale was trading at 70.35 euros, down nearly 5 per cent on the day.
On January 24, the bank had announced that it lost 4.9 billion euros in an alleged fraud by one of its arbitrage traders, and would also write off more than 2 billion euros because of losses incurred in the US subprime scandal.
