A court in Paris, France, has found notable French cement manufacturer, Lafarge, and eight of its former employees guilty of terrorism financing.
Delivering the judgment on Monday, Judge Isabelle Prevost-Desprez held that Lafarge paid some members of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) in Syria about $6.5 million (€5.59 million; £4.83 million) between 2013 and 2014 to protect its plant operating in northern Syria.
The court said this action provided oxygen for the terror group to operate and carry out its violent acts.
The former chief executive of the company, Mr Bruno Lafont, was also found complicit and has been sentenced to six years.
“It is clear to the court that the sole purpose of the funding of a terrorist organisation was to keep the Syrian plant running for economic reasons. Payments to terrorist entities enabled Lafarge to continue its operations,” the judge said, adding that, “These payments took the form of a genuine commercial partnership with IS.”
The factory in Jalabiya, northern Syria, was bought by Lafarge in 2008 for $680 million and began operations in 2010, months before the civil war began in March 2011, following opposition to then-president Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.
ISIS jihadists seized large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called cross-border “caliphate” and implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law.
To keep its plant running and protect its employees, Lafarge, between 2013 and September 2014, paid about €800,000 to secure safe passage and €1.6 million to purchase source materials from quarries under the control of the jihadist groups.
According to the BBC, Lafarge acknowledged the court’s finding, which it said “concerns a legacy matter involving conduct that occurred more than a decade ago and was in flagrant violation of Lafarge’s code of conduct,” describing the decision as an “important milestone” in the company’s actions to “address this legacy matter responsibly.”