MONTREAL—A Visa shareholder is suing to access internal documents to determine whether the credit card company continued to provide payment services to MindGeek despite “potentially criminal activity involving child pornography” on the part of the Montreal-founded company behind some of the world’s biggest porn sites.

In a Jan. 19 filing with Delaware’s Chancery Court, the Operating Engineers Construction Industry and Miscellaneous Pension Fund says it asked to inspect Visa’s books and records for “possible wrongdoing and/or breaches of fiduciary duty” on the part of Visa board members and executives by providing services to MindGeek. 

The company, now based in Luxembourg, owns titles including Pornhub and Youporn as well as TrafficJunky, MindGeek’s advertising platform. According to the filing, negotiations between Visa and the Pennsylvania-based pension fund for the release of the documents began in September but broke down in December. The credit card company “has not produced any documents in response to the demand,” reads the filing.

Since 2020, MindGeek has faced a growing number of lawsuits over alleged child sexual abuse material (CSAM) appearing on websites it owns. In August, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney denied Visa’s motion to be removed entirely from a lawsuit filed against MindGeek and Visa by Serena Fleites, the subject of a December 2020 New York Times column that claimed MindGeek was “infested with rape videos.” Visa, Carney wrote, “lent to MindGeek a much-needed tool—its payment network—with the alleged knowledge that there was a wealth of monetized child porn on MindGeek’s websites.”

“We just looked at public filings and raised some questions with the company as to the timing of their relationships with [TrafficJunky],” Delaware-based lawyer Michael Barry, who is representing the pension fund, told The Logic. Negotiations broke down after Visa insisted that any future lawsuit that the pension fund launches based on the documents be filed in Delaware, where Visa is incorporated, Barry said.

Pittsburgh-based Operating Engineers Construction Industry and Miscellaneous Pension Fund represents about 10,000 pension participants, according to administrator Scott Anderson. “We were one of the larger shareholders of Visa, that’s why [the lawyers] went to us as far as being lead plaintiff,” Anderson said. “We agreed that there were some wrong things that occurred there in [Visa’s] upper management.”

Anderson wouldn’t say how much the fund might seek in damages from Visa, but added that information already in the public domain “has damaged the price of the stock.”

Visa spokesperson Karmina Zafiro declined to answer written questions, instead referring to an August 2022 blog post, in which Visa CEO Alfred F. Kelly said the company doesn’t “tolerate the use of our network for illegal activity.” In December 2020, Visa suspended its payment services to Pornhub. In the wake of Carney’s decision, it ceased processing payments on TrafficJunky. 

MindGeek didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

The fund has been a plaintiff in a number of lawsuits against companies claiming breaches of fiduciary duties, including a suit against Las Vegas-based Wynn Resorts and its board of directors. In all cases, the pension fund is a shareholder in the targeted companies, Anderson says. “My indication is [lawyers] reach out to us normally because—I don’t want to sound arrogant—we’re more familiar with how the investments work.

“We’re protecting a larger group of people,” he continued. “Our participants have their money sent to us and then it is invested with a variety of different portfolios, and we’re just doing our due diligence to make sure that all of their benefit money is protected as much as possible.”

Delaware’s Chancery Court is a 230-year-old institution known as a court of equity. It deals with cases where the law doesn’t prescribe specific outcomes, and provides flexible resolutions that include non-monetary orders and injunctions. Recently, the court served as the venue for Twitter’s attempt to compel Tesla CEO Elon Musk to make good on his US$44-billion offer to buy the company.