DataCell, the Icelandic company that processes payments to Wikileaks, says it will sue Visa for cutting off payments to the organization.
“DataCell, who facilitates those payments towards WikiLeaks, has decided to take up immediate legal action to make donations possible again,” the company’s chief executive Andreas Fink said in a statement.
“Visa is hurting WikiLeaks and DataCell in high figures,” he said. “Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish.”
The statement seems directed mostly at Visa and does not mention whether DataCell is planning legal action against Mastercard.
DataCell said it expected claims to be in the “billions of Euro.”
“This might be very well the end of the credit card business worldwide,” Fink wrote.
“This is not about the brand of Visa, this is about politics and Visa should not be involved in this,” he said.
Both Visa Europe and Mastercard Worldwide announced this week that they would cut off payments to Wikileaks. Visa said Wikileaks would be suspended pending an investigation into whether it broke the law.
Both the Visa and Mastercard web sites were taken down briefly today by hackers, going by the name of Anonymous, who swamped the sites with denial of service attacks.
Wikileaks has seen its flow of donations take hit after hit, with PayPal cutting off payments and the Swiss Post Office bank closing its account.
Facebook Conversations
Questions about commenting with non-Facebook accounts like Yahoo, or other concerns? Click here to read the TPM Commenting FAQ.