French Court Jails Lafarge CEO, Convicts Eight Others for Financing Islamic State and Al-Qaeda in Syria

A French court has delivered a landmark conviction against one of the world’s largest cement companies, finding Lafarge and nine individuals including its former chief executive guilty of financing terrorist organisations including the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in war-torn Syria more than a decade ago.

Presiding judge Isabelle Prevost-Desprez sentenced former Lafarge CEO Bruno Lafont to six years in prison on Monday, with eight other employees also convicted of aiding and abetting terrorist activities through payments totalling at least $6.5 million made to insurgent groups in northern Syria between 2013 and 2014.

The court found that Lafarge’s payments to the terror organisations were not incidental but constituted what the judge described as a deliberate commercial arrangement with Islamic State fighters. “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,” Judge Prevost-Desprez stated.

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She went further, characterising the relationship between the company and the terror group as a partnership, noting that the payments facilitated safe passage for workers who needed to cross the Euphrates River to access the Manjib plant — a facility that sat in territory increasingly controlled by armed factions.

Former deputy managing director Christian Herrault, who defended the decision to maintain operations in the conflict zone by arguing the company was protecting the welfare of local staff, was sentenced to five years in prison. Firas Tlass, a Syrian former Lafarge employee who physically delivered the funds to the terrorist groups, received a seven-year sentence handed down in absentia.

Lafarge was ordered to pay a fine of $1.3 million, the maximum financial penalty applicable to such offences a figure prosecutors had specifically requested given the severity of the conduct.

The company acknowledged the ruling in a statement cited by Reuters, describing the conduct as a historical matter that violated its own code of conduct. Lafarge said the verdict concerned events that occurred more than a decade ago and represented a flagrant breach of internal company standards.

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The French conviction echoes a 2022 legal settlement in the United States, where Lafarge paid $777 million as part of a plea agreement over the same illegal payments to terrorist groups in Syria one of the largest corporate terrorism-financing cases in history.

The ruling is significant not only for its criminal dimensions but for the precedent it sets in holding corporate leadership personally accountable for decisions that fund violence, even when those decisions are framed as practical business measures taken under extreme circumstances.