A French court on Monday sentenced former Lafarge chief executive Bruno Lafont to six years in prison for paying armed jihadist groups to keep the company’s Syrian cement plant operating in 2013 and 2014, in a ruling that Le Monde described as a landmark corporate terrorism-financing case.

The court ordered Lafont to begin serving his sentence immediately and handed former deputy managing director Christian Herrault a five-year prison term, according to Le Monde. Lafarge itself, now owned by Swiss group Holcim, was fined nearly €5.7 million for violating European sanctions and counterterrorism financing laws, Bloomberg reported.

Lafarge, through its Syrian subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria, paid nearly €5.6 million in 2013 and 2014 to jihadist groups and intermediaries so that its Jalabiya plant in northern Syria could keep running, according to the court ruling. The beneficiaries of the payments included Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, then Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, according to Le Monde.

Presiding judge Isabelle Prevost-Desprez said the financing by Lafarge was instrumental in helping Islamic State consolidate control over Syria’s natural resources and fund attacks in the region and abroad, particularly in Europe. The judge characterized Lafarge’s relationship as a genuine commercial partnership with Islamic State, Le Monde reported.

Lafarge acted with a “single aim: profit,” according to prosecutors in the case, who also alleged that Lafont gave clear instructions to keep the plant operating even as other multinationals exited Syria in 2012. Lafarge evacuated expatriate staff but kept Syrian employees in place until September 2014, when Islamic State seized control of the factory, according to the report. 

The court traced payments benefiting Islamic State to at least November 2013 and cited an April 2014 document in which the group allegedly said Lafarge employees could pass because they had “paid their dues to us”, Bloomberg said. 

Monday’s ruling comes against the backdrop of Lafarge’s 2022 guilty plea in the United States, where the company admitted conspiring to provide material support to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations and agreed to pay a $778 million fine. That case marked the first time a corporation had faced such a charge in the United States, Le Monde said. 

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