The porn giant Mindgeek acquired by a Canadian private equity fund
It is a risky choice on the part of an investment fund that claims to be “ethical”. Thursday, March 16, the Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which specifies on its site to seek “opportunities in industries which require ethical principles”, announced the acquisition of the global **** giant, MindGeek.
Founded in 2004, this very discreet group of a thousand employees, registered in Luxembourg but which has offices in Montreal, Nicosia, London, Bucharest and Los Angeles, is the owner of several **** streaming platforms, including ****hub and You****. In the press release announcing the operation, the amount of which is not disclosed, ECP prefers to modestly define MindGeek as “a dynamic technology company that manages some of the most popular adult entertainment platforms in the world”.
ECP also emphasizes that “MindGeek must play a leading role in combating illegal content on the Internet”, and claims to place at the heart of its values ”the protection of children, the safety of intimate images and digital self-determination. “. So many fronts on which the parent company of ****hub has been regularly attacked in recent years.
Legal proceedings
In December 2020, the “New York Times” published an article accusing ****hub of broadcasting videos of child abuse and non-consensual sex acts. Visa and Mastercard then withdrew their payment systems from the site. In the process, Mindgeek, while denying the allegations of the “New York Times”, tightened controls, prohibited downloading by users whose identity has not been verified and deleted millions of videos whose author is not was not identified.
This did not prevent the group from being targeted by various legal proceedings, in California and Alabama. In Canada, a federal parliamentary committee also looked into these accusations in 2021, denied by the company, whose two main leaders resigned in June 2022.
Last August, Visa and MasterCard, have chosen to no longer allow the use of their payment cards for buying advertising on TrafficJunky, Mindgeek’s advertising network, after a lawsuit was filed in California accusing Visa of being complicit in charges of distributing child ****ography against MindGeek (again denied by the group).
115 million visitors
Nothing to scare Ethical Capital Partners. “We are confident that the MindGeek team and all of MindGeek’s platforms operate with trust and security at the heart of everything they do,” said one of the fund’s founders, Sarah Bain. , which promises to engage with “stakeholders including content creators, governments and industry to resolve the disconnect between how MindGeek operates and what the public perceives of this industry and its platforms. A welcome desire for transparency.
According to the Financial Times, the last revenue published by MindGeek, in 2018, was $460 million. On its site, the group specifies that its platforms receive more than 115 million visitors every day.
