By Fatimah Idera
Lafarge SA has agreed to pay $778 million and also pleaded guilty to a United States federal court of conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and another terrorist organisation.
The U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, has charged them with one count of conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, Lafarge pleaded guilty and was sentenced at a hearing there.
Lafarge was purchased by Switzerland-based, Holcim in 2015. Lafarge SA and LCS have accepted responsibility for the actions of the individual executives involved, whose behaviour was in flagrant violation of Lafarge’s Code of Conduct as it admits to taking responsibility for its staggering crime.
In a statement, the company, said it deeply regret that the conduct occurred and has worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve the matter
The company’s dealings with the terrorist group were the subject of an internal investigation several years ago, the corporation said employees of a legacy company were paying off intermediaries without regard to the identity of the groups involved to keep operations running and the plant safe as violence escalated in the region.
Lafarge Cement Syria executives bought materials needed for their cement plant in the Jalabiyeh region of northern Syria from ISIS-controlled suppliers, and paid monthly “donations” to ISIS and ANF, so that employees, customers and suppliers could cross checkpoints around the plant.
However, Lafarge Cement Syria eventually agreed to make payments to ISIS based on the volume of cement that LCS sold to its customers, which Lafarge and LCS executives likened to paying taxes.
An indictment against Lafarge and its defunct Syrian subsidiary was unsealed and no individuals have been charged in the case, but authorities said their investigation is ongoing.
Amid civil war, Lafarge made the unthinkable choice to put money into the hands of ISIS, one of the world’s most barbaric terrorist organizations, so that it could continue selling cement.
Lafarge did not merely in exchange for permission to operate its cement plant – which would have been bad enough – but also to leverage its relationship with ISIS for economic advantage, seeking ISIS’s assistance to hurt Lafarge’s competition in exchange for a cut of Lafarge’s sales.
The $10.24 million in payments to ISIS, the al-Nusrah Front and intermediaries were made from August 2013 through October 2014, and occurred even as the terror group was a kidnapping and killing Westerners as It was an unprecedented corporate prosecution under the material support of terrorism law, according to the US Justice Department.
