Lafarge found guilty

On 13 April 2026, the Paris Criminal Court found Lafarge guilty of financing a terrorist organisation and violating international financial sanctions.¹ The verdict is not final and remains subject to appeal. The former French cement multinational entered into ‘commercial partnership with Islamic State (ISIS),’ the court found, concluding a trial that began in November 2025, a decade after attacks by ISIS killed 130 in the court’s home city.

For four years, in May 2010 – September 2014, France-based Lafarge operated the Jalabiya cement plant in Syria’s Aleppo Governorate. During the final year of the plant’s operation, beginning some time in 2013, it paid ISIS and local Al-Qaeda successor Al-Nusra Front US$6.6m (reconverted from €5.59m, per the French court – Lafarge paid in Dollars). It took 12 years to convict the alleged perpetrators. Now, former Lafarge executives and affiliates are set to spend a combined 32 years and six months behind bars. The sentences were as follows:

Above – Table 1: Convicted Lafarge-terror conspirators in order of severity of their sentences. Source: Mark Handley, Duane Morris LLP.

Additionally, Lafarge received fines of US$1.32m for terrorist financing and US$5.38m for breach of sanctions. How did it come to this for the world’s largest cement multinational?

Lafarge’s entry into Syria at the start 2008 was a quiet sideshow to its acquisition of then 9Mt/yr-capacity Egyptian Cement Company’s parent Orascom Cement in Egypt for US$12.9bn. Orascom Cement’s other assets included a 4.4Mt/yr plant in Algeria and a 0.6Mt/yr cement plant in Türkiye, with a 20% stake in another, 2.2Mt/yr plant there.³ Orascom Cement had on-going new cement plant projects in Iraq, Nigeria and the UAE and had plans for a 2.5Mt/yr plant in Indonesia. It also held a 98.7% stake in a project to build a new cement plant in Syria. The project was situated in eastern Aleppo Governorate, 30km east of the River Euphrates, 30km south of the Turkish border and 80km from the nearest city, Raqqa. This would become the 2.6Mt/yr Jalabiya cement plant, commanding a 23% share of the Syrian market in the course of its doomed existence. The plant was very much Lafarge’s ‘baby,’ with the group investing US$680m in it, the largest foreign investment in Syrian history to date.

Lafarge Syria Cement represented a first foothold in what would become Lafarge’s Mediterranean Basin and Middle Eastern region. This accelerated its strategic growth in emerging markets, from which it expected to derive 65% of earnings in 2010, up from 45% in 2007.⁴ At that time, commentators were still pondering the potential global effects of an emerging ‘US sub-prime mortgage sector crisis.’

In acquiring Orascom Cement, Lafarge took on US$1.65bn of debt. It anticipated annual savings of US$177m. In the last full year of the plant’s operation in 2013, Lafarge noted that its returns ‘Continued to be impacted by the current environment’ surrounding the country’s civil war (2011 – 2024). It reappraised its previous outlook as US$27.2m above recoverable amount. Executives must have been feeling some pressure.

Lafarge was not operating the Jalabiya cement plant alone. From Orascom Cement, it also inherited a minority partner: Min Ajl Suriyya, a conglomerate belonging to local tycoon Firas Tlass. Tlass helped mediate between Lafarge and the Syrian government, and latterly rebel groups, included the designated terrorist PKK, after the plant fell behind their lines in 2011. Tlass apparently continued to manage things as payment structures grew more layered, and Lafarge seemingly thanked him by raising his stake in Lafarge Cement Syria from 1.3% to 10% in 2013. By this time, Lafarge Syria Cement had evacuated its non-Syrian employees to Egypt.

It is unclear how Lafarge could have carried out its actions in Syria without supportive French and European institutions also breaching sanctions and, indirectly, funding terrorist organisations. In March 2013, the French Development Agency and European Investment Bank agreed to refinance Lafarge Cement Syria’s debts in the sanctioned nation.

ISIS declared its caliphate at Raqqa on 29 June 2014. Since late 2013, it had been in what presiding judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez characterised as a ‘commercial partnership’ with Lafarge Cement Syria, operating as its main raw materials and fuel supplier. Further payments secured safe passage for materials and staff. Amro Taleb served as intermediary in the dealings, along with Firas Tlass.

Investigative journalist Dorothée Myriam Kellou exposed Lafarge’s ISIS entanglement in an article in the Le Monde newspaper in June 2016, and the case was taken up in France by advocacy group Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Complaints against Lafarge in France have included crimes against humanity, complicity in war crimes, endangering the lives of others (as well as abusive exploitation of labour and degrading working conditions), financing a terrorist organisation and violating an embargo, but it only faced charges for the last two.⁵ Lafarge has also established a new first: the first French company tried for financing terrorism.

Former deputy managing director Herrault appeared in no mood for repentance: "We could have washed our hands of it and walked away, but what would have happened to the plant's employees?" Those employees are currently without recognition or redress for the effects of Lafarge’s actions, after the French Supreme Court found – in January 2024 – that French labour laws could not be applied to them. Firas Tlass continues to evade justice, having received his seven-year sentence in absentia, along with a ban from entering France. Lafarge itself claimed the findings as a ‘legacy matter.’

On one view, Lafarge’s Syria story is a reckoning for multinationals operating in developing markets – in particular, in places with active conflicts – where codes of conduct can disadvantage them differently to locally-owned or other competitors. If the late 2000s were a drive to become a primarily Global South company for Lafarge, then the early 2020s may have been the great backtrack, through Holcim’s apparent realignment towards mature markets.

Holcim had no part in Lafarge’s Syrian affair. It rebranded from LafargeHolcim in May 2021, signalling Swiss ascendancy within the merged entity. More than that, the board may have wanted a clean break, and seemingly shareholders agreed. Increasingly, losing the ‘Lafarge’ looks like commercial good sense. The trade in its shares appears unaffected by Lafarge’s guilty verdict: they opened trading up 0.7% on 14 April 2026.

Lafarge left a legacy of industrious cement supply across five continents; its name may still be synonymous with cement in your home market. Now, it has a shadow global legacy of financing terror, including in its own home city of Paris, as well as in Syria where it committed its conspiracy. Many groups have been awaiting justice for what Lafarge did. Monday’s convictions might lay a groundwork for future civil lawsuits.

References

1. ACTU17, ‘Financement du terrorisme en Syrie : le cimentier Lafarge et huit ex-dirigeants reconnus coupables,’ 13 April 2026, https://actu17.fr/justice/financement-du-terrorisme-en-syrie-le-cimentier-lafarge-et-huit-ex-dirigeants-reconnus-coupables.html

2. TRT World News, 'French cement maker Lafarge found guilty of financing Daesh in Syria,' 13 April 2026, https://www.trtworld.com/article/a0e11edfd7d7

3. Encyclopaedia.com, 'Orascom Construction Industries S.A.E.,’ www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/orascom-construction-industries-sae

4. BBC News, ‘Cement giant Lafarge buys Orascom,’ 10 December 2007, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z72QydAHZNZeJIywfQTRJmByIKhkRRrPdgszTe9emfE/edit?tab=t.0

5. Public International Law and Policy Group, ‘Lafarge: A New Era of Accountability,’ 24 June 2022, www.publicinternationallawandpolicygroup.org/expert-roundtable-lafarge#:~:text=Lafarge%20was%20charged%20with%20complicity,terrorist%20enterprise%2C%20and%20forced%20labor

Source

Duane Morris LLP, ‘France – cement maker Lafarge and eight executives convicted of sanctions and terrorist financing breaches,’ 13 April 2026, https://blogs.duanemorris.com/europeansanctionsenforcement/2026/04/13/france-cement-maker-lafarge-and-eight-executives-convicted-of-sanctions-and-terrorist-financing-breaches/