As the owner of Aggregate Industries, LafargeHolcim - and its billionaire shareholders - would be the ultimate beneficiary of any scheme that destroys an East Devon farm for sand and gravel.
LafargeHolcim has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. So much so, the City of Paris can no longer bring itself to buy the annual 3000 tonnes of sand from the French-Swiss cement conglomerate, to convert a stretch of bank along the Seine into a makeshift beach. The decision to drop the company was in keeping with "the ethical commitments that Parisians can expect from the city":
Last week, as Bloomberg reported in "How Trump's Wall and Hitler Ended Up in French Political Debate", the company was targeted in the French Presidential Debate. The debate's "winner", according to polls, advocated that:
"Accomplices should be punished" said [Jean-Luc Melenchon]. "I find it very strange that the case of Lafarge, a global cement producer which acknowledges having paid IS to continue producing its damned cement, hasn’t been mentioned. Well, this company should be seized by the state. We need to make an example of those who plot with the enemy."
Nathalie Arthaud said 'LafargeHolcim is an example of what’s wrong with capitalism':
"It built the Atlantic wall under Petain and Hitler," she said, referring to the defenses built by Nazi Germany along the coast of continental Europe during the second world war. "Now, we’ve all learned, it’s been doing business with IS, and now, it wants to build the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s clear that these large groups won’t be stopped by a change in regime or a new constitution... The only thing that counts for them is their cash..."
It's something more to bear in mind, whilst DCC decides whether to ignore Objective 1 of its shiny new Minerals Plan - the Plan that was a decade in the making, the Plan that apparently "All mineral development will need to comply with" - and embrace this company's plans to fill our local roads with trucks and 2.5 million miles of diesel pollution.
.@LafargeHolcim loses #Paris beach deal over support for #TrumpWall https://t.co/ukXjUcmuFy pic.twitter.com/kT4yFgL2AL— dwnews (@dwnews) March 28, 2017
