In 2022, the giant French cement manufacturing group Lafarge, now merged with Swiss cement maker Holcim, pleaded guilty in a US court to the charge of funding terrorist organisations in Syria between 2013 and 2014 to ensure the security and activity of its cement factory at Jalabiyeh, in the north of the country, and was ordered to pay close to 778 million dollars in fines and forfeiture.
After several years of parallel judicial investigations in France to determine the responsibilities behind the payments, made to several terrorist groups including Islamic State, which finally took over the plant in September 2014, it remains now for the magistrates leading the probe to decide on a possible trial. In the process leading up to that decision, the anti-terrorism branch of the French prosecution services earlier this month gave its definitive recommendations. These were that Lafarge, and several of its former directors, be sent for trial over the payments.
Among the recurrent questions surrounding the case, is whether the French state had any responsibility in Lafarge’s dealings with the terror groups. What did the French diplomatic services know when the Lafarge group decided to finance terrorist organisations in Syria to protect its plant, which was the largest in the Middle East? What was the involvement, if any, of the French secret services, which had long maintained institutional links with those responsible for the multinational’s security operations? Could both the diplomatic and intelligence services have mutually protected themselves to avoid an indelible scandal?
Now, Xavier Laurent, public prosecutor with France’s national anti-terrorist prosecution services, the PNAT, has thrown out the suggestion that the state had a responsibility in the Lafarge affair, dismissing it as an unfounded and tardy ploy by those accused in the case, with the sole aim of minimising their own responsibility.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
That is what emerges from the document detailing the definitive conclusions and recommendations of the PNAT. The document, sent to the three examining magistrates in charge of the judicial investigations, recommends that Lafarge SA, as a legal entity, and nine members of its former management, including its ex-CEO Bruno Lafont, should be tried on charges of “financing terrorism” and the “non-respect of international financial sanctions”. It is now up to the examining magistrates, who have the final say in the matter, to decide whether to follow the PNAT recommendations.
Dated February 2nd, and previously reported by press agency AFP, Mediapart has now obtained access to the 275-page document in full.
“The question of the eventual influence of state authorities had been variously raised by several of those placed under investigation, in order to make up for the responsibility of Lafarge SA,” argued prosecutor Xavier Laurent who signed off the document. While the PNAT recognises the existence of communications between the French foreign affairs ministry and the management of Lafarge when the situation in Syria deteriorated and, beginning in 2012, when terrorist groups became established there, Laurent found that there was nothing to corroborate the suggestion that the French state had urged Lafarge to continue with its activities in Syria.
“It is not established that the Lafarge group was the object of any direct incitation, in the context of a civil war, to maintain itself in Syria,” concluded the PNAT.
Laurent underlined that within Lafarge, “internal [communication] exchanges contain no trace of an outside pressure such as that alleged a posteriori”. The prosecutor cites the example of Christian Herrault, then deputy general manager of the group, who the PNAT accuses of playing a “determining role” in the funding of terrorist groups in Syria, and who, the prosecutor argued, was continuously informed of the financing in a continuous and explicit manner.
The PNAT argued: “Christian Herrault largely based his line of defence on the existence of an incitement from the ministry of foreign affairs to maintain the activity of the Lafarge group in Syria, insisting on the knowledge of the situation that the French state authorities should have had, and on the strategic angle of French diplomacy.”
“These circumstances, if supposed to have been established” it continued, “would not concern the characterization of the offences which Christian Herrault is accused of, because of the inability to characterize a constraint, or some established manoeuvre, that would have led the multinational to act against its own economic interest.”
“But more fundamentally, if meetings with the French diplomatic authorities on several occasions are established, from no evidence does there result any knowledge about a compromise with armed terrorist groups.”
Throughout the investigation, Christian Herrault denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Solange Doumic, said the case file contains “a multitude of elements demonstrating the perfect information of the French diplomatic authorities and the French [intelligence] services”.
“I regret and am surprised that the prosecutors don’t take these into account,” said Doumic. “The maintaining of the Syrian factory would not have happened if it did not comply with what at the time the French authorities wanted, and more broadly with French policy which actively supported the whole of the Syrian opposition, which included the most radical groups.”
She added that the “very regular meetings” between Herrault and the French ambassador to Syria were denied by the latter “up until the moment they were proven” (Paris broke off diplomatic relations with Damascus in 2012).
Doumic argued that the French intelligence services wanted the Lafarge plant to continue its activities “because, on the one hand, it represents the only point of entry into Syria for obtaining information, and on the other hand everyone thought that the troubles would not last and that the Bashar al-Assad regime would in a very short while fall.”
One man's claim that the plant was used to locate IS hostages
The PNAT has concluded that the French intelligence services acted opportunistically, but that there was no evidence that they manoeuvred behind the scenes to encourage Lafarge to remain in Syria, nor to finance terrorist groups in order to do so.
At the time of the events, Jean-Claude Veillard was security director at Lafarge, and was in contact with the military intelligence agency, the DRM, the foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, and the domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI. According to the prosecution services, he at first advised the group against doing a deal with the Islamic State (IS) group before later not opposing the idea.
The only evidence of the DGSE’s knowledge of Lafarge’s payments to IS was, the PNAT found, when Veillard told his DGSE contact on August 25th 2014. A former DGSE officer, Pierre M. (last name withheld), who, after retiring, worked alongside Veillard at Lafarge, told the investigators how he had been tasked with purchasing secure mobile phones for the use of the members of Lafarge’s executive committee “because of the Syrian affair, so that the persons could talk among themselves”.
Veillard firmly denies any wrongdoing, and claims to have in fact been a whistleblower. His lawyer, Sébastien Schapira, declined to comment on the PNAT brief. However, in a document setting out the case for the defence, cited by Mediapart last year, he insisted that Veillard had “never given aid nor advice to any operator in order to make direct or indirect payments”.
Apart from Jean-Claude Veillard, others at Lafarge, and intermediaries for the group, cited links with intelligence services to justify their actions. The PNAT recognised that some of them “acted as sources” – a role that can be difficult to prove – but that “nothing supports the claim by some [for them] to be considered as agents of the French or foreign [intelligence] services”, and that “to have acted as a source in no way exempts the legal responsibility incurred […] in the absence of any seriously established notion of a state command for the maintenance of the activity of the cement works contrary to the Lafarge group’s own strategy”.
One of the accused, Ahmad al-Jaloudi, who was in charge of security for the cement plant in Syria, has said he worked for the Jordanian secret services in liaison with France’s DGSE, the CIA and MI6. He has claimed, as reported in the media, and notably the British press, that he was given the task of locating where about 30 people taken hostage by IS, including US journalist James foley, British photographer John Cantlie and Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, were being held.
But for the PNAT, the story was different: “He could have acted as a source, more indirectly than directly, for state services, and was in no way a state agent on an operation but rather a Lafarge employee carrying out missions for Lafarge in pursuance of the interests of the company, including within the framework of the illegal schemes decided within Lafarge,” said the prosecution services. The PNAT accuses al-Jaloudi of “delivering advice for the financing of [the] terrorist enterprise” and says he “had personally transported funds to Raqqa”. The northern Syrian city of Raqqa was at the time the de facto capital of the IS group.
Al-Jaloudi’s lawyer in France did not reply to Mediapart’s request for comment.
The anti-terrorist prosecution services concluded that there was just one motive for Lafarge in entering into a deal with the terror groups to keep its plant running, and this was “strictly economic”.
“All of those placed under investigation had, in a process of seeking profit for the economic entity they served, or, for some, direct personal profit, organised, validated, facilitated or put in place a policy to send financing to terrorist organisations implanted around the cement works,” the PNAT said. The assertion is contested by the lawyers of the accused.
For the PNAT, Lafarge was willing to do everything to keep its Syrian plant, the biggest in the Middle East and completed in 2010 at a cost of close to 700 million US dollars, in activity. It has estimated that between 2012 and 2014 Lafarge paid a total of around 5 million euros to three terrorist groups – IS, the al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham – in exchange for the safety of the plant and its staff, and for the acquisition of the raw materials, sand and pozzolana, necessary to produce cement.
The PNAT underlined that “since 2014, France and also Belgium” were again targeted by the threat of terrorist attacks “inspired by the jihadist propaganda or directly planned from Raqqa”. It listed 34 terrorist attacks perpetrated by single terrorists or by small groups “radicalised and fascinated or inspired by jihadist propaganda”. In France, these included the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher shootings, the November 13th 2015 shooting and bomb attacks against the Bataclan and Paris café terraces , the truck massacre in Nice, and the murder of a priest in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.
In 2022, Lafarge agreed to pay 777.78 million dollars ‘in fines and forfeiture’ for financing the terrorist groups in Syria, in what was the first case of its kind brought by the US Justice Department.
In a statement released in October 2022 by the New York Attorney’s Office, the sums paid by Lafarge to the terrorist groups, which it found was more than the French estimate, amounted to “a staggering crime”.
The statement quoted Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen: “The defendants [Lafarge and its Syrian subsidiary] routed nearly six million dollars in illicit payments to two of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations—ISIS and al-Nusrah Front in Syria—at a time those groups were brutalizing innocent civilians in Syria and actively plotting to harm Americans. There is simply no justification for a multi-national corporation authorizing payments to designated terrorist organizations.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse