“Complicity in crimes against humanity”: Lafarge’s indictment confirmed

Lhe Lafarge group remains indicted for “complicity in crimes against humanity” concerning its activities until 2014 in Syria, confirmed the Paris Court of Appeal, AFP learned from sources familiar with the matter. As part of this judicial investigation, the subject of many procedural developments, the group, now a subsidiary of Holcim, is suspected of having paid in 2013 and 2014, via a subsidiary, several million euros to terrorist groups, including the Islamic State organization. (EI), as well as to intermediaries in order to maintain the activity of a cement factory in Syria, in Jalabiya, while the country was sinking into the war. The group had invested 680 million euros in the construction of this site, completed in 2010.

The Court of Appeal followed on this point the requisitions of the general prosecutor’s office which estimated that the company had “financed, via subsidiaries, the activities of the EI to the tune of several million dollars, with precise knowledge of the actions”. Against, this time, the opinion of the general prosecutor’s office, the Court of Appeal pronounced the maintenance of the indictment of Lafarge for “endangering the life of others”, that is to say of former Syrian employees who had to continue their activity in the Jalabiya cement plant when the region was in the throes of civil war. The group had obtained from the Paris Court of Appeal in November 2019 the cancellation of its indictment in 2018 for “complicity in crimes against humanity”.

Intervention of the Court of Cassation

But, in September 2021, the Court of Cassation, the highest French judicial court, overturned this decision of the Court of Appeal as well as the maintenance of the group’s indictment for “endangering the lives of others” . She had referred these two questions to the investigating chamber, in a different composition. Lafarge’s lawyers, Mr.^are Christophe Ingrain, Rémi Lorrain and Paul Mallet declined to comment. The civil parties welcomed an “emblematic” decision as well as an “important step” in this judicial investigation opened in June 2017.

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