The Norwegian Financial Supervisory Authority has issued a decision finding a breach of the prohibition on market manipulation under the Market Abuse Regulation Article 15, as implemented in Norway’s Securities Trading Act, and imposing an administrative penalty of NOK 500,000 on an individual. The decision concerns two instances where the individual accumulated shares shortly before publishing positively framed articles about the same stocks on a financial news site and promoting the articles via social media, then sold all or most of the position shortly after publication. The cases involved Nordic Unmanned ASA and Questerre Energy Corporation. For Nordic Unmanned, Finanstilsynet linked a 61.9 percent price increase and unusually high volume on 29 January 2025 to an article published the prior evening and calculated a gain of NOK 239,035 on the pre-existing position, concluding the pattern reflected a coherent plan to profit from the article’s price impact. For Questerre Energy, it found the article published on 2 March 2025 coincided with an early price spike and high first-hour trading on 3 March, followed by the individual selling down the personal holding largely within 40 minutes and almost fully exiting over 3–4 March, and concluded that the attempt to exploit investor demand met the MAR standard even though the trades were loss-making overall. Finanstilsynet also determined that general ownership disclaimers did not constitute adequate and effective disclosure of the conflict created by an immediate, contrary-direction selling strategy. Finanstilsynet notes that the penalty decision has been appealed to the Financial Supervisory Authority Appeals Board.

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