14 DAY TRIAL // The Icelandic parliament is considering revoking the operating licenses of Visa and Mastercard after the two credit card companies banned donations to WikiLeaks.
The parliamentary general committee met last Friday to discus whether Visa and Mastercard has the legal right to impose such a restriction on consumers and payment processors.
Representatives from two local electronic payment companies called Valitor and Borgun, who work with Visa and Mastercard, were invited to join the discussion and so were the Consumer's Alliance, Amnesty International and Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson (via conference call).
"People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it. They [Valitor and Borgun] said this decision was taken by foreign sources," committee chariman Róbert Marshall, said, according to the Reykjavík Grapevine.
The two payment processing companies were given more time to supply the committee with the legal basis on which they locally enforced the Visa and Mastercard ban against WikiLeaks donations.
Mr. Marshall also noted that committee members currently favor a serious review of the operating licenses issued to the two credit card companies in Iceland.
DataCell ehf, the Icelandic company handling donations for WikiLeaks already announced plans to file lawsuits against Visa and Mastercard over the ban.
"This does clearly create massive financial losses to Wikileaks which seems to be the only purpose of this suspension. This is not about the brand of Visa, this is about politics and Visa should not be involved in this," said Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell.
Kristinn Hrafnsson noted that the organization he represents will most likely take legal action against the two credit card companies too.
WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange have been cut off from their main sources of revenue since last week, when PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and the Swiss PostFinance all decided to suspend their accounts or block transactions.