The French cement giant started operating in Syria just before the civil war erupted. When Islamic State took over the region, Lafarge paid them protection money so it could keep trading. The consequences are still playing out
Again and again, Bruno Pescheux made one point to his colleagues: no one must know what their company was up to. Secrecy was paramount. In 2013 and 2014, Pescheux ran the Syrian subsidiary of Lafarge SA, the French company that was then the world’s biggest cement conglomerate. As a civil war caught and spread, the company struck a grim deal: to pay millions of dollars to Islamic State (IS), the world’s most notorious terrorist group, treating it as a strategic ally.
These payments bought IS’s blessing so that Lafarge’s factory in Syria could keep making and selling cement – even as its European executives left the country, its local employees got kidnapped, and bombs and gunfire tore up the region. Lafarge bought raw materials from IS-approved vendors, supplied IS with cement, and paid them to squeeze the competition – in this case, cement imports coming over the border from Turkey. In mob jargon, this was more than protection money; in MBA jargon, the company optimised for IS. The managers in Lafarge’s Syrian subsidiary knew all too well what they were doing, and they tried hard to hide it. Once, while referring to vehicle passes that IS issued Lafarge’s trucks, Pescheux emailed a go-between to say that “the name of Lafarge should never appear for obvious reasons in any document of this nature. Please use the words Cement Plant if you need but never the one of Lafarge.”
