LuXXXembourg for Porn, LFP.
As in Fleites vs Mindgeek and Visa
Over the years Luxembourg
has become a notorious player in the lucrative porn business. This blog
reported as early as 2011 about Luxembourg’s dominant “position” in the
worldwide porn business: https://egidethein.blogspot.com/2011/11/luxembourgs-move-to-exxxtreeme.html
Mindgeek SARL, formerly
known as Manwin is a Luxembourg SOPARFI, a sort of holding company owning
shares in a multitude of porn sites such as Pornhub, Youporn, Brazzers, you
name it. Visitors on those sites were 3,500,000,000 in 2019.
But like banking secrecy
where you get accused of being an accessory to tax evasion and money
laundering, porn may give you 3.5 billion “Likes”, but not only. Access for
minors on those sites, revenge porn, sexual exploitation, outright slavery and
human rights abuse are out of control in that world and seem to be voluntarily
treated with benign neglect by various authorities.
For Luxembourg, a recent
member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, it is at least an
embarrassment to be an accessory to this kind of trade. Though an unapologetic
one: when the question of who regulates Mindgeek came up, both the Luxembourg
Government and ALIA, the Luxembourg independent authority for audiovisual
activities, enacted Pontius Pilatus: they claim, they are not in charge. But
Cyprus is because Cyprus houses one executive entity of the porn empire, under
the name of MG Freesites Ltd. However European legislators in France and
elsewhere will certainly start pressure. In such an international debate, as it
happened with banking secrecy, Luxembourg cannot not win the moral argument and
eventually at least confront the lobby of local professionals who are also
accessories to the scandal.
The most important threat
to the porn industry and Luxembourg’s peace of mind about it may still be legal
actions in the US. Variety reports about the recent rulings by US District
Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court of the Central District of
California. In the case of Fleites vs Mindgeek, a case of a thirteen-year-old girl
who was pressured into a sexually explicit video posted on Pornhub. The video
was viewed probably millions of times.
The case extends beyond
Mindgeek to Visa accused to have participated in sex trafficking ventures. As the
case is getting to Mindgeek’s money flows, it gets to the ultimate owners of
the porn sites that generate the revenue. Those matter to the Court, says the
judge in the case.
With the judge’s focus on
who gets the revenue and who is abetting those activities we may be millimeters
away from a Luxembourg Soparfi saving taxes when collecting those revenues from
its porn empire! And the Soparfi will be paying just a little tax to someone else
who then obviously is also benefitting: the Luxembourg tax man!
I would advise, as I did
for years with the tax evasion industry: rid that industry of the criminal
problems infesting it now, or you will, after a couple of years of protracted maneuvering,
have to make decisions under pressure.
