Lafarge has pleaded guilty to paying armed groups in order to ease the movement of its staff and goods within a war zone in Syria.
The French cement company was fined charged $778 million as penalty after pleading guilty at a United States court in Brooklyn of conspiring to provide material support to the jihadist group ISIS and another terrorist organization as part of a deal with the U.S. justice department, CNN reports.
The company had denied allegations that it paid $15.3 million to the Islamic State to retain a cement plant north of Syria at the dawn of the country’s civil war in 2011.
It also denied having a hand in money getting to terrorists and made concerted efforts to have the suit nullified.
But in September 2021, it lost the battle when a top court in France quashed the decision of a lower court dismissing charges of the company’s involvement in crimes against humanity in war-torn Syria.
According to court filings from the plea deal the Justice Department reached with the company, Lafarge entered a revenue sharing scheming with ISIS and the Al-Nusrah Front that produced millions of dollars for the terrorist groups.
“Lafarge made a deal with the devil,” CNN quoted US Attorney Breon Peace of the Eastern District of New York as saying at a press conference after the court proceedings.
“The Intermediaries court document further said Lafarge and Lafarge Cement Syria — a dormant subsidiary and a defendant in the prosecution, entered the conspiracy with “the explicit purpose of incentivizing ISIS to act in a manner that would promote LAFARGE’s and LCS’s security and economic interests,” he said.
The justice department said ISIS took over Lafarge plant when the company evacuated the cement plant in 2014, and the terror group sold the cement it had produced for roughly $3.2 million.
“The defendants paid millions of dollars to ISIS, a terrorist group that otherwise operated on a shoestring budget — millions of dollars that ISIS could use to recruit members, wage war against governments and conduct brutal terrorist attacks worldwide,” Mr Peace quoted as saying.
