Lafarge SA pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $777.8 million Tuesday to resolve a U.S. federal criminal charge related to the French company’s payments to ISIS another terror group to keep a cement plant operating in Syria.
The nearly $17 million payments to ISIS and the al-Nusrah Front were made from August 2013 through October 2014, and occurred even as the terror group was kidnapping and killing Westerners.
“Lafarge has admitted and taken responsibility for its staggering crime,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in a statement. “Never before has a corporation been charged with providing material support and resources to foreign terrorist organizations.”
Peace’s office said Lafarge Cement Syria executives bought materials needed for their cement plant in the Jalabiyeh region of northern Syrian from ISIS-controlled suppliers, and paid monthly “donations” to ISIS and ANF, so that employees, customers and suppliers could cross checkpoints around the plant.
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,’ ” Peace’s office said.
An indictment against Lafarge and its defunct Syrian subsidiary was unsealed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, charging 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.
No individuals have been charged in the case, but authorities said their investigation is ongoing.
“In the midst of a 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,” said Peace.
“Lafarge did this 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,” Peace said.