Who Will Build The Wall? Trump's Mexico Border, Syrian Rebels May Be Funded By Same Company

A French-Swiss cement company that recently admitted to channeling funds to armed militants in Syria offered Thursday to help build the U.S.-Mexico border wall proposed by President Donald Trump, TeleSur reported. LafargeHolcim, the world's largest cement company, expressed its desire to be a partner in the wall's construction, which was officiated in an executive order signed in January by Trump.

The firm's CEO Eric Olsen said the wall, intended to stem the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico into the U.S., was "an infrastructure project where we would participate." The announcement came the same day as the company confessed to taking "unacceptable" measures to protect its plant in Syria by paying off armed militants possibly including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The company, which is a merger of cement companies Lafarge of France and Holcim of Switzerland, came under investigation by human rights groups Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Right as well as nearly a dozen former employees from the plant itself in November over allegations it had worked with militant groups potentially guilty of war crimes in Syria. The lawsuit charged the firm's subsidiary, Lafarge Cement Syria, with entering into "business relations" with ISIS in order to allow the plant to keep running when the jihadists took over the northeastern town of Jalabiya in 2012. The company said Thursday it could not be certain whether it provided funds to ISIS, but admitted to financing "sanctioned parties" in the conflict.

“It appears from the investigation that the local company provided funds to third parties to work out arrangements with a number of these armed groups, including sanctioned parties, in order to maintain operations and ensure safe passage of employees and supplies to and from the plant ," the company said in a statement, reported by Financial Times. "In hindsight, the measures required to continue operations at the plant were unacceptable . . . the investigation revealed significant errors of judgment that are inconsistent with the applicable code of conduct."

In a separate statement Thursday, the company said it considered the U.S. to become its most important market, where Trump reportedly planned a $1 trillion boost to infrastructure projects. Trump's administration has estimated the massive border wall project would cost about $10 billion, but other experts have placed the number as being closer to $25 billion. The structure would be somewhere between 30 and 55 feet tall and cover about 1,000 miles of the U.S.' southern border, through which an estimated 5.8 million undocumented Mexicans, in addition to many more nationals of other Latin American nations, have entered the country to reside.