Lafarge Pleads Guilty To Paying Isis $10m To Keep Factory Open

French cement company Lafarge has pleaded guilty to paying 10 million US dollars to the Islamic State and another terrorist group in exchange for the protection of its plant in Syria said the US Department of Justice.

The charges were announced in a New York City federal court on Tuesday. The allegations involve conducting earlier investigations by authorities in France.

Lafarge paid ISIS and the al-Nusrah Front from August 2013 to October 2014 when ISIS was carrying out kidnappings and beheadings and transmitting waves of propaganda designed to inspire terrorist attacks against innocent civilians, prosecutors said.

The case was described by the US Justice Department as the first of its kind.

Lafarge has agreed to pay fines of roughly 91 million dollars (£80.5 million) and forfeit an additional 687 million dollars (£608 million) for a total penalty of around 778 million dollars (£688.5 million).

Prosecutors accused the firm of turning a blind eye to Isis’s conduct, paying to it at a time when it was involved in torturing kidnapped westerners.

“The defendants routed nearly six million dollars (£5.3 million) 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,” assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in a statement.

“There is simply no justification for a multi-national corporation authorising payments to (a) designated terrorist organisation,” he added.

“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,” Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

“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.”

Lafarge said in a statement that it has “accepted responsibility for the actions of the individual executives involved, whose behavior was in flagrant violation of Lafarge’s Code of Conduct.”

“We deeply regret that this conduct occurred and have worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve this matter,” the statement added.