Icelandic Court Rules: Wikileaks Will Get Contributed Credit Card Money

New submitter mordur writes "An Icelandic District Court has ordered the payment processing company Valitor to immediately reopen the merchant account (Icelandic original) of DataCell and start processing credit card payments for the Wikileaks organization. Noncompliance on behalf of Valitor will result in daily fines of ISK 800.000 (approx. USD 60.000). Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell, and thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011. The court found that Valitor had failed to prove that the processing of payments for Wikileaks was contrary to the business policies of the international credit card companies, nor had the company proved that DataCell was in breach of the service agreement between the companies by serving Wikileaks."

Comments

Good decision by Icelandic court

[ACTA sucks]

European countries always seem to have the most common sense in their rulings. USA is out of reality and Asia keeps to their own stuff. EU shines.

I think we should let the US companies and government to know that they can't do shit like this to us Europeans by banning Visa, Mastercard and Google from operating in Europe. Remember, we do have our own credit card processing networks too - lets use them instead. That way your privacy is better too, as your data isn't handed to US companies and therefore US government has no access to them.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Maquis196]

Well it's not all milk and honey over here. Our airlines ARE supposed to give data to the US government if the airline has anything to do with America. I'm in the UK and were bow down to most US requests for people or information.

Iceland isn't EU (although they are attempting to join afaik), they just happen to be an awesome country that seems to care about such things. They must have been doing a good job, my goverment called them terrorists once for letting their banks fail (oh no, not the banks!).

This might have been feeding a troll but wanted to set a small record straight :)

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[CanHasDIY]

Forcing a company to do business with someone they don't want to. Yeah, wonderfully enlightened position EU

from the summary you clicked to get to this page:

Under pressure from the USA based international credit card companies, Valitor stopped all service to DataCell and, thus to Wikileaks, just hours after having started processing payment in July 2011.

In other words, Valitor did indeed want to do business with them, but were strongarmed by US credit card companies into violating their contract with DataCell.

Must be troll...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah the bank thing was hilarious.

"We demand the government reimburse us for the money held in failed Icelandic banks!"

"Why? the debt was not backed by the full faith and credence of the government; that's why the interest rates were so high"

"HERP DERP I DON'T CARE GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!"

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Iceland actually totally fucked up at banking not so long ago. However, that may have actually had a salubrious effect. In the US and EU, the fuckuppery of the banking sector has been massive; but small enough that shovelling bushels of money at the people responsible can be advanced as a 'reasonable' proposal. In the case of Iceland, the scale of the meltdown of the imaginary money economy was so enormous that even the most overtly delusional had difficulty advocating the 'just bail out the Experienced Experts who got us here' theory of repair...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[SteveFoerster]

Don't get me wrong, I love Iceland, but I believe that the world's oldest democracy is San Marino, which has been a republic since its founding in A.D. 301.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[ceoyoyo]

A bunch of banks that happened to be in Iceland, but not backed by the government, made some promises they couldn't keep. A lot of people, mostly in the UK, fell for those promises, and when everything went belly up they demanded that the Icelanders make good on them, which would have essentially bankrupted the country. The Icelanders felt that wasn't fair, and had the wherewithal to tell the banks, the investors, and the countries that were backing them, to go to hell.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it sucks when those damned socialist courts force you to honor your contracts, eh?

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Anonymous Coward]

Scandinavian peninsula is in Europe, it consists of Sweden, most of Norway and some parts of Finland. Iceland is an island in the middle of Atlantic ocean which is halfway split between European and American plates.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[CowTipperGore]

This might have been feeding a troll...

Let's see. Brand new account, other posts are pro-Microsoft, and he worked a slam on Google into a post about Iceland and Wikileaks. We have a winner!

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[shentino]

There's nothing wrong with backing banks as long as all we do is keep them from taking their depositors down with them.

The problem with the US system is that we prop up zombies that don't deserve to stay in business.

But protecting innocent depositors is a good thing.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Lol, yeah. I like to simply view the British "losses" in the Icesave situation as a late payment for all the cod the British stole from Icelandic waters.

"Losses" is in quote because the banks actually are, in fact, paying off their minimum insured obligations, and are on track to finish paying them off within the next year or so (they're already half done). The Icelandic government took on huge amounts of debt, in no small part to help prop up the banks and get them back on their feet so they'd be worth enough to sell off enough asset value to do this. And the British and Dutch are still suing us in the EFTA. Gee, thanks. We appreciate the whole mackerel thing, too. How dare Iceland and the Faroes fish a non-negligable portion of a fish that does most of its growing in Icelandic and Faroese waters? Such insolence, I know. Best to pressure the EC to slap sanctions on us for "overfishing" (aka, taking a non-negligible portion of the catch) when you refuse to negotiate.

Remember all that electricity you're wanting to buy?...

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

Like the people who had their money in Lehman Brothers? Sorry, but there's a difference between a regular bank account and an investment account. Icesave was a program predominantly for retirement funds and municipal investment funds. It wasn't a checking account program.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080225152959/http://icesave.co.uk/legal.html: "Deposits made with Icesave are protected under the Icelandic Deposit Guarantees and Investor-Compensation Scheme (details of this scheme may be obtained from www.landsbanki.com/legislation). Payments under this scheme are limited to the first €20,887 (or the sterling equivalent) of your total deposits held with us. You have further protection from the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (www.fscs.org.uk). Payments under this scheme are limited to 100% of the first £35,000 of all your deposits with us, less any payments made under the Icelandic scheme. This means that the maximum claim amount as at October 2007 is £35,000. The total financial protection given to you under both schemes is no less than you would receive if your deposit was only protected by the UK scheme. Further details about both schemes can be obtained from our web site or by post, on request."

Following the Icelandic side's link for the fund that backed the deposits: Hmm, nowhere in here do I see anything about government backing. Do you?

The fund went bankrupt. The British tried to force the government to pick up the bill. Which is frankly BS. The accounts were never guaranteed by the government, you can't make the government suddenly start guaranteeing them *after* a crash.

Re:Good decision by Icelandic court

[Rei]

First off, there were *three* cod wars, in case you forgot. After overfishing your waters (and the waters of several other countries - I've found the Irish people I've met have a lot to complain about on this front, too), you sent trawlers to overfish other people's waters. Iceland's among them, but hardly alone. You started doing that not long after you *invaded* and occupied Iceland, a neutral country, with one of the most bungling invasions ever, in order to prevent a nonexistent Nazi plan which existed only in your leaders' minds. But I digress. You started fishing as little as *4 kilometers* from Iceland's shore, meaning that Icelanders could sit there and easily watch your trawlers overfishing Iceland's waters. The first Cod War pushed you back to 12, which is still easily in sight of the shore, overfishing Iceland's waters with even more ships involved. The second Cod War pushed you back to what was then the international limit of 50km. However, by the 1970s, many nations had already began asserting 200km exclusive economic zones - in fact, the first ones were claimed in the 1940s. By the 1970s, they had become standard. Heck, the groundwork for the concept of the EEZ began from work from UK in *1939* with the Panama declaration, and then in 1942 concerning the Gulf of Paria. The UK claimed exclusive economic access to a wide range of area outside their territorial waters in 1964. And even if all this wasn't the case, it's ridiculous that Britain felt that it had the god-given right to trawl up the lion's share of the fish in waters right next to Iceland - let alone ignoring how much you were overexploiting the stocks (something Iceland immediately reversed). Iceland's actions were upheld by the International Court of Justice in 1974 (United Kingdom vs. Iceland, 1974 ICJ Rep 3, 75).

You were saying?

do you really think the cost would add up to the $5 billion you owe to Britain and the Netherlands?

Well, let's see... Iceland's fisheries are worth about $1.5 billion a year, and you were exploiting them from the 1940s to the 1970s... so no, you still owe us a damn lot more. Perhaps *you* should vote on a repayment plan.

concerning a single industry that really isn't that important.

Once again, the world revolves around you. Yeah, not that important for you. It's only 40% of our entire economy. Which was the crux of the whole problem.

Past problems aside, if someone lends you money you owe it to them to pay it back.

Companies go bankrupt. Deal with it. Just ignoring that there was clearly no government guarantee, who in their right mind expects a government backing on a 6% interest rate? What's next, do you want us to ensure that anyone who buys junk bonds to get their money back if they loses value? Full reward, no risk, is that the plan?

Especially if the countries lending it are currently hard up themselves

Oh yeah, really hard up compared to Iceland, which had just had the per-capita equivalent of 300 Lehman Brothers fail at once.

Iceland, for the win

[circletimessquare]

The 2008 crisis hacked them worse than the USA and Europe. Now, 4 years later, they are riding high, and Europe and the USA are still muddling through. How? Why?

For a country that four years ago plunged into a financial abyss so deep it all but shut down overnight, Iceland seems to be doing surprisingly well.

It has repaid, early, many of the international loans that kept it afloat. Unemployment is hovering around 6 percent, and falling. And while much of Europe is struggling to pull itself out of the recessionary swamp, Iceland’s economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year. ...

But during the crisis, the country did many things different from its European counterparts. It let its three largest banks fail, instead of bailing them out. It ensured that domestic depositors got their money back and gave debt relief to struggling homeowners and to businesses facing bankruptcy.

“Taking down a company with positive cash flow but negative equity would in the given circumstances have a domino effect, causing otherwise sound companies to collapse,” said Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland. “Forgiving debt under those circumstances can be profitable for the financial institutions and help the economy and reduce unemployment as well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/world/europe/icelands-economy-is-mending-amid-europes-malaise.html?pagewanted=all

We, in Europe, and the USA, have much to learn from Iceland about how to survive a crippling financial crisis.

Re:Iceland, for the win

[BlueStrat]

We, in Europe, and the USA, have much to learn from Iceland about how to survive a crippling financial crisis.

Yeah, like NOT putting the very people responsible for the bank's failures in powerful government positions.

Obama Administration: Deputy Director, National Economic Council
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Financial Analyst

Obama Administration: Chairman, Presidentâ(TM)s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Board Member (Chairman, 1990-94; Director, 2005-)

Obama Administration: Commissioner, Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Partner and Co-head of Finance

Obama Administration: Undersecretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, State Department
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs Group

Obama Administration: Ambassador to Germany
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Head of Goldman Sachs, Frankfurt

Obama Administration: Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: Lobbyist 2005-2008; Vice President for Government Relations

Obama Administration: Advisor to Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geitner
Former Goldman Sachs Title: President and Chief Operating Officer (1999-2003)

They should just change the name from the "White House" to "Goldman Sachs House". Yeah, I'm sure they'll do the right thing to protect regular US taxpayers.

Strat

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Catbeller]

People in Iceland, like the USA, were in danger of losing their homes due to circumstances beyond their control.

The US yakked about "moral hazard" and let the banks take everyone's homes.

Iceland spent a tiny bit and let people keep their homes.

Now the US has millions of disillusioned, unhomed people whose collective demand has pumped rental costs to unaffordable heights, so they are screwed both ways.

In Iceland, people remained in their homes, found new jobs, and everyone is happy except the Friedmanites and Randites. The moral hazard was understood differently. In Iceland, you say, they believed the real moral hazard was the societal breakdown caused by people ruined through no fault of their own, but by the actions of foreign bankers - so they made sure it didn't happen.

In the USA, it is our firm economic religion that people's failures are their own, and them's the breaks. Except rich bankers of course, who made out fine, own everyone's abandoned homes, and are about to make an even bigger killing when the value goes up and they can unload. The moral hazard is never the rich man's, always the schmuck's. 19th century plantation capitalism; freedom is for the owners, not the serfs. You wanna be free, get rich, lazy parasites...

Re:Iceland, for the win

[Svartalf]

More like an Oligarchy...