The French court found Lafarge guilty of paying jihadists to keep its Syria cement plant open – Copyright AFP Delil souleiman<\/p>\n
Alexandre Marchand and Eleonore Dermy<\/p>\n
A French court on Monday fined the cement group Lafarge over $1.3 million and sentenced its former boss to six years in prison for paying protection money to the Islamic State group and other jihadists\u00a0to maintain its business in war-torn Syria.<\/p>\n
The ruling follows a 2022 case in the United States in which the French firm pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to US-designated \u201cterrorist\u201d organisations and agreed to pay a $778 million fine, the first time a company had faced the charge.<\/p>\n
The Paris court found that Lafarge \u2014 now part of the Swiss conglomerate Holcim \u2014 paid nearly 5.6 million euros ($6.5 million) in 2013 and 2014 via its subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria (LCS) to jihadist groups and intermediaries to keep its plant operating in northern Syria.<\/p>\n
It ruled that Lafarge must pay the maximum fine of 1.125 million euros ($1.31 million) sought by prosecutors during the trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It also sentenced the company\u2019s former CEO Bruno Lafont to six years in prison for financing \u201cterrorism\u201d, which a judge ordered him to start serving immediately \u2014 even though a lawyer confirmed that Lafont would appeal the ruling.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis method of financing terrorist organisations, and primarily IS, was essential in enabling the terrorist organisation to gain control of Syria\u2019s natural resources, allowing it to finance terrorist acts within the region and those planned abroad, particularly in Europe,\u201d said the presiding judge, Isabelle Prevost-Desprez.<\/p>\n
The company established a \u201cgenuine commercial partnership with IS\u201d, she added, saying the amount paid to jihadist organisations \u2014 which was \u201cnever disclosed\u201d \u2014 contributed to the \u201cextreme gravity of the offences\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lafarge had finished building a $680 million factory in Jalabiya in 2010, just before Syria\u2019s civil war erupted in March the following year amid opposition to then-president Bashar al-Assad\u2019s brutal repression of anti-government protests.<\/p>\n
IS\u00a0jihadists seized large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a cross-border \u201ccaliphate\u201d and implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law.<\/p>\n
While other multinational companies left Syria in 2012, Lafarge evacuated only its expatriate employees and left its Syrian staff in place until September 2014, when IS jihadists seized control of the factory.<\/p>\n
In 2013 and 2014, Lafarge paid intermediaries to access raw materials from the Islamic State organisation and other groups and to allow free movement for the company\u2019s trucks and employees.<\/p>\n
It paid jihadists including the Islamic State group and Syria\u2019s then Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.<\/p>\n
\u2013 \u2018Single aim: profit\u2019 \u2013<\/p>\n
The defendants included the company, five former members of operational and security staff, and two Syrian intermediaries.<\/p>\n
The court found all eight former employees guilty of financing \u201cterrorist\u201d organisations and issued sentences ranging from 18 months to seven years behind bars.<\/p>\n
Firas Tlass, a Syrian ex-member of staff who made the payments to the jihadist groups, was sentenced in absentia to seven years in jail.<\/p>\n
Former deputy managing director Christian Herrault was handed five years in jail.<\/p>\n
Herrault had argued that the decision to keep the factory open was made out of concern for local staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could have washed our hands of it and walked away, but what would have happened to the factory\u2019s employees?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said 69-year-old Lafont \u201cgave clear instructions\u201d to keep the plant operation, a decision they called \u201cstaggering in its cynicism\u201d.<\/p>\n
The French national counterterrorism prosecutor\u2019s office (PNAT) said in its closing argument in December that Lafarge was guilty of funding \u201cterrorist\u201d organisations with \u201ca single aim: profit\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Second case ongoing \u2013<\/p>\n
Holcim, which took over Lafarge in 2015, has said it had no knowledge of the Syria\u00a0dealings.<\/p>\n
A second case, concerning allegations of complicity in crimes against humanity, is ongoing.<\/p>\n
Kurdish-led Syrian fighters, backed by US airstrikes, defeated the IS \u201ccaliphate\u201d in 2019.<\/p>\n
An inquiry was opened in France in 2017 after several media reports and two legal complaints in 2016, one from the finance ministry for the alleged breaching of an economic sanction and another from non-governmental groups and 11 former Lafarge Syria staff members over alleged \u201cfunding of terrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the US case, the Justice Department said Lafarge sought the Islamic State group\u2019s help to squeeze out competitors, operating an effective \u201crevenue sharing agreement\u201d with them.<\/p>\n
Lafont, who was chief executive from 2007 to 2015, at the time denounced the inquiry as \u201cbiased\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The French court found Lafarge guilty of paying jihadists to keep its Syria cement plant open – Copyright…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1108,382,24472,95,1823],"class_list":{"0":"post-65186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-construction","9":"tag-france","10":"tag-jihadism","11":"tag-syria","12":"tag-trial"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116397590641989291","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}