FINANCIAL COMMUNICATION: FRAMEWORK AND PRACTICES - 2019 EDITION

68 Regulations related to the information on employee representative bodies must also be complied with. FINANCIAL DIFFICULTY 106 The AMF pays particular attention to financial information disclosed by issuers in financial difficulty. On principle, the issuer remains responsible for information provided to the market, regardless of proceedings in progress. Periodic financial information must be provided to the market, regardless of the difficulties facing the listed company and of whether or not preventive or collective proceedings have been launched. In this respect, any issuer in financial difficulty must closely monitor changes in its debt as well as its available cash at the time of its periodic disclosures. Implementing the ongoing disclosure requirement is more complex when it affects the confidentiality of preventive proceedings designed to help companies in difficulty (special mediation and conciliation). In contrast, no such confidentiality restrictions exist with regard to collective proceedings (safeguard, rehabilitation and compulsory liquidation), since the ongoing disclosure requirement applies. The AMF recommends that issuers in financial difficulty take particular care to meet their market disclosure obligations in a timely manner at the different stages of any such proceedings and especially at the end of negotiations with creditors for issuers involved in preventive proceedings, at the start of collective proceedings, upon receiving takeover offers, or whenever the schedule of such proceedings is changed. In advance of any collective proceedings, the AMF imposed sanctions on an issuer, on the basis of article 223-2 of the AMF General Regulations, for having published information relating to a material downturn in its current operating income, only six months after it became aware of this specific, non-public information, which was likely to influence the market price of its financial instruments 107 . Furthermore, it is recommended that companies inform the AMF upon the start of preventive proceedings and during the proceedings, and upon the start of collective proceedings. In the latter case, the issuer shall also disclose its provisional calendar. 106 – AMF Position/ Recommendation no. 2016-08 – Guide to ongoing disclosures and the management of insider information (section 1.4.4). 107 – AMF Enforcement Committee, SAN-2017-06, June 20, 2017.