The trial against the Lafarge group and eight former directors, suspected of having paid jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, in Syria until 2014 with the aim of maintaining the activity of a cement factory there, opens this Tuesday in Paris. It is the first time in France that a multinational is tried for acts of this type.
The nine defendants will be tried before the criminal court until December 16 for financing terrorist enterprises and, in some cases, also for non-compliance with international financial sanctions.
Along with Lafarge, absorbed in 2015 by the Swiss group Holcim, the former general director of the French cement manufacturer Bruno Lafont, five former managers of the operational chain or the security chain and two Syrian intermediaries will be tried in Paris, one of whom, the subject of an international arrest warrant, should be absent from the trial.
Several million euros paid to terrorist groups?
The French group is suspected of having paid in 2013 and 2014, through its Syrian subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria (LCS), several million euros to jihadist rebel groups – some of which, such as the Islamic State (IS) and Jabhat al-Nusra, have been classified as “terrorists” – to maintain the activity of a cement factory in Jalabiya, in northern Syria. The company had invested 680 million euros in this place, whose construction was completed in 2010.
While other multinationals left the country in 2012, Lafarge only evacuated its foreign employees that year, and kept its Syrian employees operating until September 2014, when ISIS took control of the factory.
During this time, LCS allegedly paid middlemen to obtain raw materials from ISIS and other groups, and to facilitate the movement of employees and goods. The judicial investigation was opened in Paris in 2017 after several media revelations and two complaints in 2016, one from the Ministry of Economy for violation of the embargo and another from the Sherpa associations, the European Center for Constitutional Rights (ECCHR) and eleven former LCS employees for financing terrorism.
“Responsibilities of multinationals”
The new group resulting from the 2015 merger, first called LafargeHolcim and then renamed Holcim in 2021, which has always been careful to disassociate itself from the events prior to this operation, had meanwhile launched an internal investigation. Entrusted to the American law firms Baker McKenzie and French Darrois, it concluded in 2017 that “violations of Lafarge’s code of business conduct” had occurred.
And in October 2022, Lafarge SA pleaded guilty in the United States to having paid ISIS and Jabhat Al-Nusra almost $6 million and agreed to pay a colossal financial fine of $778 million. In France, Lafarge faces fines of up to €1.125 million for financing terrorism. In the case of violations of the embargo, the fine incurred is higher, reaching up to 10 times the amount of the crime, which will ultimately be retained by the courts.
According to the defense of Bruno Lafont, who denies having been informed of payments to terrorist groups, the agreement to plead guilty is a “flagrant attack on the presumption of innocence, which throws former Lafarge executives in the trash” and was intended to “preserve the economic interests of a large group.”
For the former director general, who “hopes to finally be able to defend his honor and understand what happened”, the process that is being opened will allow “clarifying” several “gray areas of the case”, such as the role of the French intelligence services. The investigating judges considered that if information had been transmitted between Lafarge security officials and the secret services about the situation around the site, this did not “in any way demonstrate the validation by the French State of the financing practices of terrorist entities implemented by Lafarge in Syria.”
Sherpa, a civil party in the case, believes that this trial is an “unprecedented opportunity for French justice to examine the responsibility of multinationals when they operate in conflict zones.” Another sound aspect of this case is still under investigation, as the group has also been accused of complicity in crimes against humanity in Syria and Iraq.
Source: BFM TV
