Masha Gessen↱ considers the convictions of Bruno Lafont and Christian Herrault in Paris, on charges of financing terrorism through Lafarge, a leading international cement manufacturer.
Lafont and Herrault were among four Lafarge executives convicted and sentenced in the case; the National law Review↱ reports that Bruno Pescheux and Frédéric Jolibois, who ran the company's Syrian factory, have also receved carceral sentance. Masha Gessen's account for the New York Times only mentions Pescheux briefly, "a lawyer for Bruno Pescheux, the former director of the Lafarge plant in Syria, claimed ignorance on her client's behalf: 'Your court says that everyone knew who ISIS was, and I say to you: Not Mr. Pescheux!'"
The case could reverberate; Gessen describes a conference on genocide and mass atrocities, an event she happened to attend in the days before the verdict:
Bracewell, the government relations law firm that published the NLR article, observes, "While the DOJ chose, at the time, not to pursue charges against the individuals involved in the Lafarge scheme, the Department's priorities have since shifted to focus on individual conduct," and reminds, "With this increased scrutiny and heightened threat for individual prosecution, it is now even more important for companies to ensure internal controls and compliance policies prevent and detect wrongdoing", as well as recalling a client alert that, "DOJ has revised the Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy (CEP) to now offer clearer benefits — such as potential declinations and fine reductions — for companies that demonstrate transparency, cooperation and a genuine commitment to remediation incentives for self-reporting".
That is to say, the Paris decision has the attention of people whose job it is to know these things. The degree to which it "rewrites the rules" remains to be seen, but apparently this isn't to be taken lightly.
____________________
Notes:
Boeckman, Nicole et al. "Lafarge Executives Sentenced to Prison in France for ISIS Payments: Could US Executives Face Similar Fates for Cartel Payments and Bribes?" The National Law Review. 17 April 2026. NatLawReview.com. 17 April 2026. https://natlawreview.com/article/la...france-isis-payments-could-us-executives-face
Gessen, Masha. "A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality". The New York Times. 17 April 2026. NYTimes.com. 17 April 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/lafarge-corporate-terrorism-syria-france.html
Their individual sentences were striking, but the big news was something else: For the first time in France, and possibly for the first time ever, anywhere, an entire corporation had been put on trial and found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. Two of the civil rights lawyers who brought the case were still beaming when I caught up with them a short while later by video at the courthouse. Claire Tixeire, of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who spoke to me with her colleague Anna Kiefer, of the human rights organization Sherpa, said seeing a chief executive sentenced to prison was "exceptional." Also exceptional was the scathing tone of Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez's verdict, which took almost four hours to read.
The court had concluded that between 2013 and 2014, the cement maker paid about $6.5 million to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, to facilitate the company's operations there. Lafarge — now owned by the Swiss conglomerate Holcim — will have to pay about $1.3 million in fines for the crime of financing terrorism and $5.3 million for violating international sanctions. In another case, Lafarge is facing charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. If that case goes to trial and Lafarge is again found guilty, a new chapter in the prosecution of war crimes may begin.
In the best-known war crimes prosecutions — at Nuremberg, in Jerusalem, in The Hague — most of the defendants were military or paramilitary officers. But at Nuremberg, industrialists who had aided and abetted the Holocaust were also put on trial. These cases largely fizzled, in part because the defendants successfully claimed that they had merely been doing what businesspeople do, which is try to maximize profits, and that they hadn't known what kind of atrocities they were enabling.
Eighty years later, Lafarge executives attempted the same basic defense strategy. Prosecutors showed extensive email correspondence documenting agreements with terrorist organizations to help secure the Lafarge cement plant's continued operations in Syria. They projected a slide of a travel document used by Lafarge drivers. It displayed the black Islamic State flag and the text "In the name of Allah the Merciful, the mujahideen are asked to let this vehicle transporting cement from the Lafarge plant pass through checkpoints, following an agreement with the company for the trade of this material." Former employees testified that while their European colleagues were evacuated to safety, Syrian workers were forced to keep doing their jobs in a war zone, under bombings, frequently crossing through checkpoints under sniper fire, facing the threat of kidnapping. All while their employer was financing the armed groups that terrorized Syrian civilians. The former chief executive maintained he hadn't known where the company money was going.
When prosecutors produced an email requesting a meeting between Lafarge executives and terrorist-group representatives, Lafont claimed not to have read it. "I'm not a child of the internet," he said. "Emails that I'm copied on, I don't read, and emails from people I don't know, I don't open." (Lafont's lawyers have said he is appealing.)
The court had concluded that between 2013 and 2014, the cement maker paid about $6.5 million to the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria, to facilitate the company's operations there. Lafarge — now owned by the Swiss conglomerate Holcim — will have to pay about $1.3 million in fines for the crime of financing terrorism and $5.3 million for violating international sanctions. In another case, Lafarge is facing charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. If that case goes to trial and Lafarge is again found guilty, a new chapter in the prosecution of war crimes may begin.
In the best-known war crimes prosecutions — at Nuremberg, in Jerusalem, in The Hague — most of the defendants were military or paramilitary officers. But at Nuremberg, industrialists who had aided and abetted the Holocaust were also put on trial. These cases largely fizzled, in part because the defendants successfully claimed that they had merely been doing what businesspeople do, which is try to maximize profits, and that they hadn't known what kind of atrocities they were enabling.
Eighty years later, Lafarge executives attempted the same basic defense strategy. Prosecutors showed extensive email correspondence documenting agreements with terrorist organizations to help secure the Lafarge cement plant's continued operations in Syria. They projected a slide of a travel document used by Lafarge drivers. It displayed the black Islamic State flag and the text "In the name of Allah the Merciful, the mujahideen are asked to let this vehicle transporting cement from the Lafarge plant pass through checkpoints, following an agreement with the company for the trade of this material." Former employees testified that while their European colleagues were evacuated to safety, Syrian workers were forced to keep doing their jobs in a war zone, under bombings, frequently crossing through checkpoints under sniper fire, facing the threat of kidnapping. All while their employer was financing the armed groups that terrorized Syrian civilians. The former chief executive maintained he hadn't known where the company money was going.
When prosecutors produced an email requesting a meeting between Lafarge executives and terrorist-group representatives, Lafont claimed not to have read it. "I'm not a child of the internet," he said. "Emails that I'm copied on, I don't read, and emails from people I don't know, I don't open." (Lafont's lawyers have said he is appealing.)
Lafont and Herrault were among four Lafarge executives convicted and sentenced in the case; the National law Review↱ reports that Bruno Pescheux and Frédéric Jolibois, who ran the company's Syrian factory, have also receved carceral sentance. Masha Gessen's account for the New York Times only mentions Pescheux briefly, "a lawyer for Bruno Pescheux, the former director of the Lafarge plant in Syria, claimed ignorance on her client's behalf: 'Your court says that everyone knew who ISIS was, and I say to you: Not Mr. Pescheux!'"
The defendants had known, the judge concluded, that staying in Syria would require cooperation with terrorist groups. That made Lafarge complicit — not only in atrocities committed in Syria but also in acts of terrorism that the Islamic State carried out in France. One of the prosecution's witnesses was a survivor of the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan theater, in Paris, which along with coordinated attacks in other locations killed 130 people and left more than 400 injured. In her verdict, Judge Prévost-Desprez kept returning to the testimony of this witness. "I am trying to make you understand how choices made in your offices, thousands of kilometers away, turned into Kalashnikov bullets, into blood," the judge said.
The money Lafarge plowed into the coffers of militant organizations most likely made a significant difference in their capabilities. "The court emphasizes that, given the cost of living in Syria during the period in question, the sum of 5,593,897 euros disbursed by Lafarge SA does not have equivalent purchasing power in Raqqa as it does in Paris," Prévost-Desprez wrote. "Thus, by knowingly paying extremely large sums over many months to three terrorist organizations, Lafarge SA enabled them to expand their influence and fuel their deadly campaigns, ultimately leading to attacks committed abroad as well as on French soil."
The money Lafarge plowed into the coffers of militant organizations most likely made a significant difference in their capabilities. "The court emphasizes that, given the cost of living in Syria during the period in question, the sum of 5,593,897 euros disbursed by Lafarge SA does not have equivalent purchasing power in Raqqa as it does in Paris," Prévost-Desprez wrote. "Thus, by knowingly paying extremely large sums over many months to three terrorist organizations, Lafarge SA enabled them to expand their influence and fuel their deadly campaigns, ultimately leading to attacks committed abroad as well as on French soil."
The case could reverberate; Gessen describes a conference on genocide and mass atrocities, an event she happened to attend in the days before the verdict:
Afterward, I wondered why the gathering had felt peculiarly hopeful, especially given the subject matter and where and when it was held: in an America where immigrants are being subjected to concentration camps and mass deportations — which some of the assembled experts described as atrocities — on the weekend after the president used the threat of genocide to try to bring Iran to the negotiating table. Then I realized: The participants — legal scholars and practitioners, philosophers, anthropologists and a distressingly large number of former State Department employees whose programs have been eliminated by the Trump Administration — actually believe that at least some atrocities can be prevented. One of the most important potential mechanisms of prevention is justice.
At the conference I met Rebecca Hamilton, a cheerful war-crimes lawyer who is now a law professor at American University in Washington. Corporate complicity is her area of study. In a 2022 law review article titled "Platform-Enabled Crimes," she wrote that Facebook (now Meta) could have acted to help prevent the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017, but that it had chosen not to. The decision not to act, Hamilton wrote, had been driven by both the profit motive and a lack of interest in local context. Now Hamilton is working on a book on corporate enablers of atrocity crime. "Securing profit isn't some abstraction achieved in pristine boardrooms in capital cities," she wrote in an email to me on Monday after the Lafarge verdict, which had made her, too, very happy. "It is a process that plays out in real locations, with real people, including those living through conflict."
Prosecuting corporations is particularly difficult for at least two reasons. One is the problem of intent, which is essential to determining guilt in a criminal trial. Does a corporation have a mind? Can it have intent? The defense in the Lafarge trial claimed that the company's and its executives' only intent was to keep the Syria plant in operation; the judge concluded that the executives' exclusive focus on this goal was itself incriminating, since it could be achieved only by cooperating with armed groups terrorizing and plundering Syria.
At the conference I met Rebecca Hamilton, a cheerful war-crimes lawyer who is now a law professor at American University in Washington. Corporate complicity is her area of study. In a 2022 law review article titled "Platform-Enabled Crimes," she wrote that Facebook (now Meta) could have acted to help prevent the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2017, but that it had chosen not to. The decision not to act, Hamilton wrote, had been driven by both the profit motive and a lack of interest in local context. Now Hamilton is working on a book on corporate enablers of atrocity crime. "Securing profit isn't some abstraction achieved in pristine boardrooms in capital cities," she wrote in an email to me on Monday after the Lafarge verdict, which had made her, too, very happy. "It is a process that plays out in real locations, with real people, including those living through conflict."
Prosecuting corporations is particularly difficult for at least two reasons. One is the problem of intent, which is essential to determining guilt in a criminal trial. Does a corporation have a mind? Can it have intent? The defense in the Lafarge trial claimed that the company's and its executives' only intent was to keep the Syria plant in operation; the judge concluded that the executives' exclusive focus on this goal was itself incriminating, since it could be achieved only by cooperating with armed groups terrorizing and plundering Syria.
Bracewell, the government relations law firm that published the NLR article, observes, "While the DOJ chose, at the time, not to pursue charges against the individuals involved in the Lafarge scheme, the Department's priorities have since shifted to focus on individual conduct," and reminds, "With this increased scrutiny and heightened threat for individual prosecution, it is now even more important for companies to ensure internal controls and compliance policies prevent and detect wrongdoing", as well as recalling a client alert that, "DOJ has revised the Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy (CEP) to now offer clearer benefits — such as potential declinations and fine reductions — for companies that demonstrate transparency, cooperation and a genuine commitment to remediation incentives for self-reporting".
That is to say, the Paris decision has the attention of people whose job it is to know these things. The degree to which it "rewrites the rules" remains to be seen, but apparently this isn't to be taken lightly.
____________________
Notes:
Boeckman, Nicole et al. "Lafarge Executives Sentenced to Prison in France for ISIS Payments: Could US Executives Face Similar Fates for Cartel Payments and Bribes?" The National Law Review. 17 April 2026. NatLawReview.com. 17 April 2026. https://natlawreview.com/article/la...france-isis-payments-could-us-executives-face
Gessen, Masha. "A Stunning New Verdict Rewrites the Rules of Corporate Morality". The New York Times. 17 April 2026. NYTimes.com. 17 April 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/lafarge-corporate-terrorism-syria-france.html