suspected of fueling the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons program, a company sanctioned

AA/Tunis

The French Council of State rejected the appeal of a company in the 10th arrondissement of Paris accused of trading with the Syrian regime and which wanted to cancel the last round of economic sanctions which had been inflicted on it in January 2021, media reported French.

Smart Pegasus – which was removed from the Paris Trade and Companies Register (RCS) in June 2024 – was officially established in a business domiciliation office on rue de Chabrol. Its original corporate purpose was to specialize in “the import-export of all unregulated products,” reports the Actu.fr website.

Its manager, Jamal R., a 61-year-old Frenchman of Lebanese origin, joined forces in this affair with a compatriot and two Syrians; two of them live like him in Beirut (Lebanon) and the fourth, in Hama (Syria), specifies the same media.

The company was in fact accused with others of constituting “one of the first networks of supplier companies” to the Center for Syrian Studies and Research (CERS). The latter had himself been the subject of a “freeze of his assets” due to his “support for the Syrian army for the acquisition of equipment used directly for […] the repression of demonstrators,” indicates the same source.

“Operating in the sector of the proliferation of chemical weapons, this is the public entity responsible for the production of chemical weapons,” explained the Paris administrative court in a judgment rendered in November 2022, recalls the French media.

Smart Pegasus “acts consciously to facilitate the supply to the CERS of goods used in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction”, justified the sixth ministerial decree pronouncing the freezing of its assets for “six months”… and constantly renewed every six months since January 2018.

A “white note” from the intelligence services even detailed that the Parisian company was “affiliated” with a group which had itself “purchased from Chinese suppliers” in 2016 “chemical products prohibited for sale” and which had been “ used by the CERS in the synthesis of war toxicants,” indicates the same source.

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