On 13 April, a Paris courtroom gave a judgement eight years after the legal work began. The Paris Criminal Court found the former Lafarge head, Bruno Lafont, guilty of funding armed groups in Syria. The judge gave Bruno Lafont six years in prison.
The ruling is the first time a former head of a French global firm has been found guilty of such acts. The court established that the Syrian branch of Lafarge paid €5.59 million to armed groups, during 2013 and 2014.
The purpose was to keep the Jalabiya cement plant in north-eastern Syria running during the civil war.
Presiding judge Isabelle Prevost-Desprez spoke plainly: “These payments took the form of a genuine commercial partnership with the Islamic State.” The Paris court fined Lafarge €1.12 million and took €30 million of the company’s assets.
The French national counter-terrorism prosecutor’s office spoke of the plan as one done “with a single aim: profit.”
Lawyers for Bruno Lafont said they would appeal. Lafarge already admitted to the core of the claims in a 2022 deal in the United States. In that case, it paid $778 million in penalties.
The OIV Framework and What It Covers
The Lafarge legal action stems from the official standing of the group in France. Starting in 2013 with the Military Programme Law, France has kept a secret list of Operators of Vital Importance (OIVs).
The list contains various entities whose breakdown would greatly weaken the war potential, economic power, security, or survivability of the country. Roughly 300 groups have the tag, spread across twelve areas of work like energy, finance, health, industry, transport, and state tasks.
The French state hides the names as a state defence secret. It forbids companies from telling the public about the tag.
The OIV rules put tagged groups under hard computer security laws set by the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information (ANSSI). The rules also force companies to tell state leaders about any breaks in work.
Lafarge, as a big French building group, and TotalEnergies, the largest energy firm in France, would fall into the areas the OIV rules always guarded.
The state views the work of the groups as tied to the economic security of the land. The view leads to an unspoken political trust that France must keep the groups working, no matter the place.
Why Conflict Zones Attract Indispensable Companies
The reasoning for the OIV tag holds up inside the borders of France. The state shields firms that provide the tools of national survival.
Trouble starts upon the expansion of the groups into foreign regions where no one checks their work.
France has maintained trade interests in former lands for a long time. OIV-tagged firms that went into such markets often worked in places with weak rule.
Lafarge got into Syria by buying an Egyptian group called Orascom Cement in 2007. The Jalabiya plant opened in 2010, a few months before the Syrian war began.
Once armed groups took land around the plant, the heads of Lafarge stayed.
The company heads sent hundreds of thousands of euros through middle-men to get workers safely across the Euphrates. The leaders also bought stones from mines held by the insurgents.
The court established that the sum for safe passage arrangements alone exceeded €800,000, with a further amount over €1.6 million covering materials from mines the militia held.
The plant needed $680 million to buy. Keeping production going meant saving the capital put into it.
Governments with a stake in their main firms seldom push them to leave disputed markets.
TotalEnergies: A Almost Identical Situation
An event that looked very much the same happened in eastern Africa. Last November, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) filed a criminal claim with the French counter-terrorism prosecutor against TotalEnergies.
The claim cited helping with war crimes, torture, and people being taken away at a gas project in the Cabo Delgado area of Mozambique.
The claim looked at what investigators called the “container massacre.”
In the massacre, soldiers from a Joint Task Force paid and fed by TotalEnergies allegedly held, hurt, and killed dozens of civilians at the site of the firm during July and September 2021.
Alex Perry, the writer who first told of the event in Politico in 2024, called it the “bloodiest disaster in oil and gas history.”
Internal papers proved TotalEnergies knew of claims of violence against people since May 2020. The firm kept helping the Joint Task Force throughout.
Clara Gonzales from ECCHR spoke with care: “Companies and their executives are not neutral actors when they operate in conflict zones: if they enable or fuel crimes, they might be complicit and should be held accountable.”
Nanterre prosecutor started a first look at TotalEnergies, which denied the claims, in March 2025.
Courts Retrieve What Boardrooms Abandoned
In theory, France built a legal answer for the lack of oversight seen in the aforementioned cases. The 2017 Corporate Duty of Vigilance Law forces big French firms to put out yearly plans.
The plans must look for risks to human rights in the work of the firm and its sellers. France backed the law as a map for European rules. The EU used the law during the drafting of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
Human Rights Watch reported in early 2025 that the French government started to block the European version of the rules France once liked. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, reportedly helped to weaken the rules.
The Lafarge ruling and the TotalEnergies legal action uncover the limits of domestic protection. France has named the groups as ones the land cannot do without.
French courts, as the Lafarge verdict confirms, recognise the bounds of corporate indispensability. European leaders should proactively draw the same line before a courtroom decides for them.
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