...Billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros has been fined 2.2m euros (£1.4m; $2.3m) for insider trading. A Paris court found Mr Soros guilty of profiting from inside knowledge of a 1988 takeover bid for Societe Generale, a French bank.
... The charges relate to a raid on Societe Generale by tycoon Georges Pebereau, who built up a substantial stake in the bank before trying to take control.
The bid failed, but not before the bank's share price had more than doubled. Mr [George] Soros and three other defendants, the court found, bought Societe Generale stock when it was cheap, and cashed in their investment when the price rose after the bid became public. Two other businessmen implicated in the scandal - Edmond Safra and Robert Maxwell - have since died.
The affair was widely seen as a symptom of the corruption of public life in France under the presidency of Francois Mitterrand, from 1981 to 1995. Mr Pebereau, who has never been charged with any offence in relation to the Societe Generale deal, was acting at the instigation of Mr Miterrand's socialist administration, which opposed the bank's privatisation under the previous government. ...------- "Soros found guilty of insider trading," BBC, Friday, 20 December, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2594273.stm
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