LuXXXembourg for Porn, LFP. As in Fleites vs Mindgeek and Visa.

 

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.