Lafarge contests its indictment for endangering its Syrian employees

The highest court of the French judiciary will deliver its judgment on November 7. She will also rule on the validity of the group's indictment for complicity in crimes against humanity.

Since 2018, parent company Lafarge SA has been indicted for complicity in crimes against humanity, financing a terrorist enterprise and endangering the lives of others.

The group, now a subsidiary of Holcim, is suspected of having paid in 2013 and 2014, through its Syrian subsidiary Lafarge Cement Syria (LCS), several million euros to jihadist groups, including the Islamic State (IS) organization. , and to intermediaries, in order to maintain the activity of a cement factory in Syria in Jalabiya, even as the country was sinking into the war.

In this context, Lafarge had maintained the activity of its Syrian employees on the site until September 2014, while its employees of foreign nationality had been evacuated in 2012.

“Syrian employees were exposed to the risk of extortion and kidnapping,” recalled the rapporteur, during a public hearing focused on the applicability of French labor law for these employees employed in Syria by a legal sub-subsidiary. Syrian, more than 98% owned by the parent company.

Me Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for the group, argued that French law could not apply and relied in particular on an opinion from the social chamber of the Court of Cassation of July 4.

This concludes that the legal obligations of the employer to train workers in safety and to update the single risk assessment document (which Lafarge did not do in Syria) are not laws of police, laws whose application cannot be excluded.

Catherine Bauer-Violas, lawyer for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and two employees, civil parties, maintained that their "employment contract has closer links" with France than with the Syria.

“The Lafarge company exercised real management power over employees (...) it regulated the safety rules applicable to the subsidiary,” she insisted.

The Advocate General recommended the rejection of Lafarge's entire appeal, arguing that "the decisions it (Lafarge SA) took in France at its head office demonstrated that its Syrian subsidiary was ultimately only an empty shell.