An Employment Court judgment delivered in 2023 has gained fresh relevance as
scrutiny of Worldline SA and its German subsidiary Payone GmbH intensifies.
The judgment, issued in a UK case involving a former Payone employee, accepted
evidence that a Senior Sales Executive Florian Risch recounted a due diligence scenario
involving the viewing of animal pornography. The material, described in Court
documents as “people having sex with animals,” was allegedly reviewed by a former
female colleague as part of onboarding procedures for a merchant in the adult content
sector.
Mr Risch, who had transitioned from Payone to Worldline at the time of the dinner
conversation in 2019, initially denied the exchange had taken place. However, he alleges
that after being reminded by someone, he later clarified under oath that he had
described the incident as part of a Worldline due diligence anecdote, not a joke. The Claimant’s position is understood to be that it was a joke.
The Court accepted that these words were “probably used,” Loopline Media understands
the Claimant in the matter rejected Risch’s account of the anecdote not being told as a
joke.
Why This Matters Now
The relevance of this testimony, if it is to be taken at it’s highest, has sharpened in the wake of the “Dirty Payments” investigation led by Mediapart and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) group. That report, published in June 2025, alleges Worldline and its subsidiaries processed billions of euros for high-risk merchants including illegal casinos, adult platforms, and ecommerce fraud schemes while allegedly ignoring regulator warnings
and fraud thresholds.
While no direct connection has been established between the specific due diligence
account described by Risch and the merchants highlighted in the investigation, the
cultural insight it provides is striking.
What the Court testimony reveals is not a punchline but a process. It implies that
reviewing explicit and potentially unlawful content formed part of merchant onboarding,
and that those tasked with performing such checks felt it appropriate or even amusing
to relay those moments later. The Court did not rule on the propriety of the due
diligence itself but accepted that the story involving such material was told, and that the
language used was deeply offensive to at least one colleague present.
A Snapshot of the Compliance Culture?
The question this raises is not whether offensive material exists online. It is whether
those responsible for onboarding high-risk clients with such grotesque and very
offensive content took the process seriously, or whether it became normalised within
internal culture potentially desensitised and reduced to dinner table chatter.
This incident adds another layer of concern to allegations from the Dirty Payments
investigation, which accuses Worldline of knowingly facilitating payments for
merchants operating in grey or outright illegal areas of commerce. The fact that a senior
executive recounted such material as part of his prior work experience at Worldline
and that the Court accepted this account as credible will likely be revisited as
regulators in Belgium, Germany, and Sweden intensify their probes.
Implications for the Present
Worldline’s response has been twofold: it has commissioned an independent audit of
its current merchant portfolio (led by Accuracy) and brought in Oliver Wyman to assess
the effectiveness of its internal controls. Both reviews are due to report alongside Q2
earnings on July 30. A key date that Loopline Media will be following closely.
Yet optics matter. This small but vivid episode, buried within a UK employment
judgment, is no longer anecdotal. It’s part of the evidentiary fabric now informing how
observers assess the culture of compliance inside Worldline and Payone — past and
present.
If the systems allowed material of that kind to enter due diligence, and if that process
was handled informally or indifferently by staff, it raises a larger question: Was it ever
just a rogue merchant problem — or a cultural one?
Here is the disclaimer:
Disclaimer: This article is written in the wake of the recent Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decision concerning Florian Risch’s 2023 court testimony referencing animal pornography due diligence at when speaking with Worldline colleague, which has come to the fore in light of the #dirtypayments investigation. This article does not constitute legal or financial advice.
