Last month, 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 sued Lafarge directly. Their argument was that the company’s payments helped finance the genocide of the Yazidi people, the mass executions, the sexual slavery, the abduction of thousands of women and children.
According to the lawsuit, Lafarge’s own cement was even used to construct the underground tunnels and bunkers where ISIS held Yazidi hostages captive.
While the European staff at the plant were evacuated to safety, the Syrian workers were told to keep working, crossing checkpoints under sniper fire, risking kidnapping, showing up to a job inside an active war zone because the cement had to keep flowing.
The judge, in delivering her verdict, said something that has stayed with me since I read it. “I am trying to make you understand,” she told the executives, “how choices made in your offices, thousands of kilometers away, turned into Kalashnikov bullets, into blood.”
This level of downline thinking is what responsibility looks like. It’s what we have been trying to offer to our readers for 17 years, the idea that as a culture, we have to think more deeply about what we’re creating and what effects it has downline, vs. thinking about more short term gratifications.
In defense, Lafont told the court he hadn’t read the emails documenting the payments. His exact line, which I cannot improve on, was “I’m not a child of the internet.” His former deputy was more direct in that he admitted in court that the groups receiving the payments had been described, in writing, as “hard-core terrorists,” and that he kept authorizing payments to them anyway. When the judge pressed him, he said they had a choice between two bad options. The judge asked, “The worst one and the less bad one?” “Exactly,” he replied.
Translated out of legalese, the defense was not surprisingly: “We were faced with losing profit or funding terror, and we chose the less expensive option for the company.”
These types of decisions are being made all over the place in our world within it’s current design. CEO’s follow incentive and fiduciary responsibility, which in essence provides them plausible deniability in most cases.
To be clear, this isn’t really a story about individually wicked men, it’s a story about a system that trains its decision-makers to weigh two things on the same scale and choose whichever one protects revenue. The race to the bottom logic baked into modern incentive structures is doing a lot of the moral work here, long before any individual executive signs off on a payment.
The court ultimately did not buy the CEO’s story and Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez called the conduct “stunningly cynical.” She fined the company €1.12 million, ordered the confiscation of €30 million in assets, and sent the executives to prison.
Why this matters more than the fine
To understand why this verdict is a big deal, you have to understand what hasn’t been happening for the last eight decades.
The most directly comparable case goes back to 1947, when executives of I.G. Farben, the German chemical company that supplied the gas used in Nazi concentration camps, were tried at Nuremberg. Most were acquitted. The few who were convicted received light sentences that were quietly commuted not long after. The legal precedent that a corporation and its leaders could be criminally accountable for the violence their products enabled was established, and then more or less left to sit on a shelf for 80 years.
In the meantime, when corporations have been found liable for harming people, the standard response has been a fine. In many cases, those fines get absorbed as a normal cost of doing business, paid out of one revenue stream while the rest keep flowing untouched.
When the fines get big enough to actually threaten profit, the response has often been overwhelming retaliation against whoever is fighting for justice. Chevron, for example, spent roughly 2 billion dollars dragging out a legal war against the lawyer who beat them in Ecuadorian court for poisoning the Amazon.
A fine is a transaction, but a prison sentence is something else entirely. It changes who, personally, is on the line, and that changes the way companies will operate form there on out. The system needs accountability, or else incentives will always win out.
The good news is that this verdict is a real crack in the assumption that corporate decision-makers can operate at a safe altitude above the consequences of what their companies actually do in the world.
But here is where I want to slow down a little, because there’s a fair question that still needs to be asked here:
Why did this one end in prison sentences when Chevron in Ecuador didn’t? When Purdue Pharma’s executives walked? Or Pfizer’s or Monsanto’s or Big Tobacco’s?
One honest part of the answer is that Lafarge’s payments helped fund a network that eventually killed French civilians on French soil. That made the politics of prosecution very different from the politics of poisoning Indigenous rivers in the Amazon, or flooding rural American towns with opioids, or any number of other harms that fall outside what Western states are willing to call a serious crime.
The legal systems we have are largely the same ones that have historically protected capital’s right to extract from communities deemed expendable.
So this verdict is a real step forward, and at the same time, it’s a reminder of where the line currently sits for who gets protected and who doesn’t. Both things can be true. The win is real, and the asymmetry is real, and pretending otherwise is just another way of not seeing the situation clearly.
What’s next
A few related cases are already moving. Starting in July of this year, EU member states will require large companies to identify and address human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, with actual consequences for failure.
Last October, a federal jury in New York found BNP Paribas liable for aiding atrocities in Sudan. The Lundin Oil trial in Sweden, which looks structurally similar to Lafarge, is expected to deliver a verdict soon. The next Lafarge trial, this one on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity, will likely follow.
There is also reasonable concern about backlash. A US administration that has sanctioned a UN rapporteur for documenting corporate complicity in Gaza, presided over a 660 million dollar verdict against Greenpeace for opposing an oil pipeline, and dismantled large parts of the EPA’s regulatory powers is not going to quietly accept a wave of accountability rulings.
The process of accountability is not fast or easy. I’ve been doing this work for 17 years and most of the stories I’ve followed or talked about don’t end up in real accountability. Pfizer’s C0VID vax trials were fraudulent, we’re not even talking about that anymore. Look at the lack of Epstein network accountability. This isn’t meant to get us down, but to realie the power of the system at hand and maintain our sense of resilience in working toward a better world.
Ultimately, this all has to still move through courtrooms, through journalism, through people who are willing to spend years pressing on a story that powerful interests would much rather have buried. None of those tools is sufficient on its own, but together, slowly, they shift what powerful people can get away with.
The good news is, the judge in Paris drew a line that hasn’t really been drawn in 80 years, and that line now exists. What we choose to build on top of it is the next question.
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