Then just before her husband, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was
fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for these pollution violations. Hillary Clinton had left the board of Lafarge in spring, just after her husband won the Democrat nomination. A year later, under Bill’s presidency, the Clinton administration reduced Lafarge’s EPA fine to less than $600,000.
Lafarge remains close to the Clintons to this day.
In 2013, Lafarge’s Executive Vice President for Operations, Eric Olson, was a ‘featured attendee’ at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.
The company is a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation – the firm’s up to $100,000 donation was listed in its annual donor list for 2015. Lafarge is also listed again as a donor to the Clinton Foundation for the first quarter of 2016.
Lafarge is a major beneficiary of disaster capitalism in Iraq, dominating a market where Iraq’s infrastructure remains in dire need of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. The company describes itself as “one of the largest non-oil investors in Iraq.”
The firm is not just an economic juggernaut. Its murky history of intelligence ties, and significant political clout in France and the US – the countries leading the airstrikes against Isis in Syria – raise the question of whether Lafarge believes it can profit from terror without accountability.