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While a judge in a Paris courtroom finished reading her verdict, police walked over and arrested Bruno Lafont. He's 69, the former CEO of Lafarge, the largest cement manufacturer in the world. He's now serving a 6 year prison sentence, and his former second-in-command is serving 5.
When corporations cause real harm in pursuit of profit, when they poison rivers, flood communities with deadly drugs, or fund violence to keep a factory running, the typical outcome is a fine. The company pays out, the executives keep their jobs or retire quietly or move on to a board seat somewhere else, and almost no one personally goes to prison. We see this massively in the pharmaceutical field.
But this ruling may change things moving forward.
What Lafarge actually did
Between 2013 and 2014, as Syria collapsed into civil war, Lafarge paid roughly 6.5 million dollars to ISIS and two other groups designated as terror organizations. The payments bought safe passage through ISIS checkpoints, which meant the company's Syrian cement plant could keep running and keep generating revenue.
Nobel laureate Nadia Murad and more than 400 other Yazidi survivors, all of them American citizens, eventually ....
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And this
The French company paid $6.5m to jihadist groups to keep its plant running in war-torn Syria, a Paris court heard.
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