Inside porn’s star chamber

This is an audio transcript of the Hot Money podcast episode: ‘Inside porn’s star chamber’

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Patricia Nilsson
As you all know by now, we made a series to investigate where power lies in the porn industry.

Alex Barker
This episode, like all the others, contains adult themes, including references to disturbing and illegal content.

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Patricia Nilsson
Around two years ago, I discovered that the world’s biggest porn company had a secret owner, a man who lived like a shadow for nearly a decade. Finding him turned out to be my gateway into the maze of the pornography business, the discovery that set us off to report on four decades of breakneck change in the industry. And when you boil it down, each era involves money moving from one wealthy pornographer to another. But today, things are different.

Alex Barker
With platforms such as OnlyFans, it has never been easier for performers to shoot content on their own terms and sell it straight to fans on demand, which yes, equals more money for them. So, all good, right? Not so fast.

Allie Knox
I specialise mostly in fetish stuff. So financial domination, just bitchy, bratty stuff.

Patricia Nilsson
That’s Allie Knox. She’s creative and bright, like many performers we met in the series. And to make a living, she hasn’t just relied on being a dominatrix. She’s carved out other personas, too.

Allie Knox
Thank you for being here to play with me today. So I thought, I’d tease you a little today and play a little bit.

Patricia Nilsson
Fans also love to watch Allie smoke weed, which she buys legally at her local dispensary in Las Vegas.

Alex Barker
She could make her own video smoking weed and she had platforms where she could sell them. In her words, she was sovereign. And when we say her fans loved it, Allie can make around $1,000 a month reselling mostly old videos of her getting stoned. Or she could. Until payments companies got cold feet.

Allie Knox
A few months ago, probably January, February, I started noticing that my videos were being rejected. So if I would upload something, the platform would say, No, you can’t have this. You had drugs in it or you had smoking weed. We don’t allow this anymore. You violated the terms.

Alex Barker
And why? It took her quite a lot of digging around. But in the end, one of the platforms she used most got back to her. They were scared of losing access to the big credit card networks.

Allie Knox
I can’t put any videos of me smoking weed on the internet anymore. Mastercard has come through and said there can be no drug use, even though, again, it’s legal.

Patricia Nilsson
This might not sound like such a big deal. Porn performers have for years not been allowed to drink alcohol in their films. This was surely just another one of those rules, a way to tighten up standards and protect people on set. But for Allie, losing a big chunk of her livelihood didn’t feel like added security.

Allie Knox
So now if I can’t do that, I got to go find where I’m going to make that thousand dollars because my mortgage hasn’t changed. My car payments haven’t changed. So am I gonna have to go to the street? Am I gonna have to escort? Am I gonna have to start crossing my boundaries? And all of those things happened when credit card processing fucks with our income.

Alex Barker
What’s so odd about Allie’s situation is that it comes after she found a degree of independence. She could make and sell her own content just as long as she had a payment channel.

Allie Knox
I had no idea when I got in the industry that my biggest (chuckle), my biggest hurdle was gonna be my, how I’d get paid. I thought I was gonna meet a crazy agent or I was gonna be unsafe on a porn site. All the things that people tell you. I never knew that my biggest risk was gonna be how I could pay my bills.

Patricia Nilsson
She is trying to use crypto, but it’s tough. She first has to convince people to use it, which can take days. Then arrange for the payment. Then wait 15 minutes or so to confirm the transaction. It’s far from ideal for impulse purchases, and this is what Allie Knox has in common with the biggest porn companies in the world. It doesn’t matter if you’re the owner of Pornhub or a one-woman enterprise. The Visa and Mastercard networks can hobble your business.

Alex Barker
Payment companies in the end set the limits of how any porn business can make money.

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So who are the people taking these kinds of decisions? Who decides what everybody, from Allie to the owners of the biggest porn sites in the world, can put on the internet?

Patricia Nilsson
In our final episode, we pull back the curtain and meet the real rulers of porn. I’m Patricia Nilsson.

Alex Barker
I’m Alex Barker. From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is Hot Money.

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Act one: The windowless room

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Patricia Nilsson
In previous episodes, we explained Visa and Mastercard were powerful enough to cripple Pornhub and MindGeek, and how payment networks day by day influence what can be made on a commercial porn site.

Alex Barker
The real mystery to us was how did they get into a position like this? It’s not like these payment companies want to be seen as porn regulators. They didn’t ask for the job and they don’t like talking about it. Both companies declined to do an interview with us.

Patricia Nilsson
But we did manage to track down two guys who used to be on the inside. Two guys who, between them, spent a total of 30 years at Visa.

First, meet a dapper Swede called Stanley Skoglund.

Stanley Skoglund
I was the enforcer of Visa’s rules for a number of years.

Patricia Nilsson
Stanley left Visa around a decade ago, but he witnessed the crucial period for our story, the moment that Visa and Mastercard became the reluctant rulers of porn land. How step by step, the companies waded into porn regulation.

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Alex Barker
It started with the explosion of the internet. Payments suddenly went from in-person transactions to virtual ones. They relied on trust on everybody playing by the rules. And in the early days, porn was the big test. It wasn’t just the credit card scammers. People would pay for porn and then if their partner found the credit card bill, a lot of them would deny all knowledge and demand a refund.

Stanley Skoglund
Porn was a hot topic. Not from a moral point of view, but because it was so desirable, but also people didn’t want to get caught using pornography. That’s why it became a big thing, you know, from a fraud perspective. So the banks then took that to Visa and said, you have to do something about this. This has to stop because we are, you know, inundated.

Patricia Nilsson
In the early 2000s, Stanley reckons porn made up roughly 10 to 15 per cent of Visa’s online transaction volumes. It was too big to ignore. And along with the fraud, Visa and Mastercard realised they had to work out ways to deal with content too — the really bad stuff, like videos of child abuse.

Stanley Skoglund
For some reason, those people who are interested in that, they found the internet a very useful place very early on, unfortunately. It would always be clandestine. It would never be obviously child porn, you know, inc come here and buy your images. So it was quite deceptive, I would say.

Alex Barker
It meant Visa had to build up its intelligence, find some way to track the internet and the sites selling porn. But who was gonna do that? Well, in the mid-90s, the man in charge of risk at Visa was a well-regarded former FBI agent called Dick Held.

Patricia Nilsson
And no Dick Held wasn’t his cover name. Dick Held really was the guy who started to figure out how to regulate internet porn. There was no obvious solution. Visa’s initial idea was just to set up a special porn monitoring team. It worked from a windowless room deep inside Visa’s headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alex Barker
Did you ever get in the room?

Kevin Smith
No, no.

Alex Barker
And this is where we want to introduce Visa guy number two, Kevin Smith.

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You heard from him in an earlier episode. He’s a payments expert and Kevin loves payments. His face lights up when talking about pin codes and zip-zap machines, the things that would take imprints of credit cards in the 1980s. For 17 years, Kevin worked for Visa, often handling issues related to high-risk merchants, in other words, porn. And that’s how he knew about the windowless room.

Kevin Smith
It was a strange thing. It was, yes, everyone knew of it, but it was, it wasn’t clandestine and secret. It just wasn’t talked about. I mean, it’s, if you look at it in hindsight, it just didn’t sound right that Visa actually had this group of people that were manually going out there trying to find violations and get them shut down. I mean, it’s a horrible job, incredibly laborious and manual and probably highly ineffective, which is why you needed to find a more technical solution to address it quickly.

Alex Barker
By the end of the ‘90s, Visa shut down the porn room. They pretty quickly realised that way madness lies. They knew they could never effectively screen all the horrors of the internet and they realised there was a much better option. They could delegate.

Patricia Nilsson
They could outsource spying on porn to somebody else in the payment system, the banks and billers and service providers and the Visa and Mastercard networks. But to outsource anything, Visa needed rules for others to apply. And when you’re a global business, on an issue like porn, that’s easier said than done.

Kevin Smith
If you look at it, you know, child pornography, everyone agrees that yeah, it’s horrible, that nobody wants to be associated with it. But actually, there are many countries around the world that don’t actually have any legislation that says, in this jurisdiction, child pornography is illegal.

Alex Barker
For a company like Visa operating across the globe, even defining what is outright illegal and definitely shouldn’t be processed can be tricky. Visa’s main regulations run to something like 900 pages. Porn is a tiny, tiny fraction of that, but it played a special role in how the rules developed. Porn was one of the first areas where card companies built an enforcement system to manage risky online business. When Visa and Mastercard started to clamp down in the early 2000s, one adult payments veteran told us it was like the sheriff coming to porn town. Real regulation. Registration rules, supervision requirements, even fines.

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Patricia Nilsson
The unique nature of porn also made Visa and Mastercard deviate from a cherished principle. These payment networks succeed by being everywhere, and they can only do that by supporting all lawful commerce without taking a moral stance. Neutrality is good for business. Porn was the exception. In the 2000s Visa decided that since their brands gave porn sites credibility, helping consumers trust them, they couldn’t ignore what the porn sites were selling, even if it was strictly legal. Mastercard took a similar approach. This is Stanley Skoglund again.

Stanley Skoglund
Those decisions we took, they were never taken lightly because, you know, Visa cannot be a policeman of the world trying to say, you can buy this, but you can’t buy that. You know you can see how that could go wrong quite quickly. But especially in these instances where it was violence, where it was borderline underage kind of simulated rape, so there were areas where the legality of it wasn’t necessarily what made Visa take action.

Alex Barker
This is all encapsulated in Visa rule 1.3.3.4, a ban on selling images that are illegal in most parts of the world, like bestiality or non-consensual mutilation. But also on top of that, a much broader catchall clause, brand protection, literally a ban on anything that might bring Visa into disrepute. And out of these decisions emerged a system for keeping porn in check, the apparatus of control we see today in the porn world. This was our takeaway. But we wanted to put it to people who had seen the system from the inside. So we asked Kevin straight up: do Visa and Mastercard rule the porn industry?

Kevin Smith
Probably, yes. And the reason for that is that there are, there are some significant names in the industry, and they are incredibly influential. But at the end of the day, they are influential over their own content. Visa and Mastercard cut across all of these. And and yes, perversely, Visa and Mastercard inadvertently has become the semi-regulator controller of this industry.

Patricia Nilsson
Visa and Mastercard use their direct power with restraint. But they ultimately oversee the card networks, the networks that create that messy thicket of rules and best practice codes that left Allie Knox unable to sell videos of her smoking weed while naked. And the ones that stopped Stoya, the performer and author we’ve heard from a few times in the series, from working when she is on her period or even telling her fans that she is.

Stoya
Whoever is the arbiter of what can be done with sexual media and sexual performance — like, I have no idea who they are — did they, did they take a philosophy class? Like, are they, do they have a degree in women’s studies?

Alex Barker
After the break, we’ll see whether there are any philosophers at the heart of Visa’s porn operation.

Act two: Playing God

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Patricia Nilsson
This series has been about power. We’ve met a cast of secretive pornographers, ruthless bankers, supercharged tech bros. And we’ve always been led by the question “who rules porn?” Who ultimately decides on what can and cannot be made in this business? And now, in slightly absurd fashion, we’ve ended up at the doorstep of Visa and Mastercard, giant financial services providers. But who at Visa was actually deciding on porn policy? As Stoya asked, are they moral philosophers, women’s studies PhDs? Kevin Smith had the answer because at one point he was one of the people making these calls.

Kevin Smith
You’ve got a number of individuals playing God in a room. That’s how the processes worked. But it’s offset by the fact that you’ve got so many different disciplines there to give you a balanced and appropriate answer based on each individual case. There’s a whole raft of individuals. It’s almost like the star chamber, because I was involved in similar versions in Visa in Europe.

Patricia Nilsson
The star chamber back in the Middle Ages was created to supplement the normal court system in England. It sometimes handled cases that were moral issues rather than clear breaches of the law.

Alex Barker
Which might sound a little familiar. At its best, the star chamber was flexible and judicious, drawing in a wide range of opinion. But under certain kings, it became a byword for arbitrary power. It was secretive. It lacked due process.

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Patricia Nilsson
So difficult to imagine, you know, senior executives at Visa sitting down at a table and being like, peeing on other people, you know, sexy or not.

Kevin Smith
Yeah, it’s a tough job if you’re sitting there looking at a review of potential non-compliance activities with the rules. You’re gonna look at the content. You’re gonna look at, you know, ridiculously sounding website names or descriptors. It comes with the territory.

Patricia Nilsson
Maybe to you it makes perfect sense. But I think to most people, kind of most civilians, it would be quite extraordinary that these types of conversations take place at Visa.

Kevin Smith
Yeah, they probably don’t realise that these conversations are happening everyday, not just on adult, but on every single merchant environment you can think of.

Patricia Nilsson
For Kevin, making decisions that could affect thousands of people in the porn industry was just part of the job, routine. The same goes for Stanley. He was more on the enforcement side but helped take decisions about businesses that broke Visa rules. He’s not a philosopher. Sorry, Stoya. But Stanley is a trained sociologist and as a student he happened to take classes in gender studies and the history of ideas. So Stoya wasn’t that far off.

Alex Barker
Stanley and Kevin, of course, wouldn’t have seen themselves as porn regulators. They were payments professionals, managers of risk and facilitators of commerce. When they were at Visa they dealt with pyramid schemes and strange frauds, with gambling and drugs, with things that pretended to be drugs. All the crazy things you can buy online. In these cases, Visa and Mastercard were trying to apply a complex patchwork of local laws within a global payments network. But as Stoya explained, porn seems to be different. Payment networks do restrict things that are legal, like menstrual blood or cats. Is that actually Visa or Mastercard? Here’s Stanley again.

Stanley Skoglund
99.99 per cent, I can tell you that that probably isn’t the case. Visa’s and Mastercard’s rules would not be as detailed. They would not address these issues. But that Visa would say, yes, you can, you know, shoot at home, but you can’t insert an object into your body or you can’t have animals in the frame or you can’t perform sex acts while you’re menstruating, no.

Patricia Nilsson
Now Stanley is right. Visa does not ban videos with menstrual blood, not explicitly in its rules. But Stoya is also right. Menstrual blood is not allowed on most of the major porn platforms that take credit cards. Why the discrepancy? The answer is quite revealing. When Kevin and Stanley think about rules, they mean the Visa and Mastercard core operating rules, the commandments. They talk of them like the law. And in these regulations, Visa doesn’t explicitly ban blood or smoking weed in videos.

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Alex Barker
Visa enjoys an arm’s length position from it all, but at the same time, Visa does encourage a whole chain of people in the porn payment system to make judgments on its behalf. They are told to protect the brand. They have to interpret the rules, monitor signs and promote what Visa would call best practices. And in part to keep Visa and Mastercard happy, those payment companies and platforms ban menstrual blood and weed smoking in porn, the example the performer Allie raised.

Allie Knox
They’re making all these arbitrary rules to push us off the internet, to push us farther and deeper underground. We’re constantly under threat of censorship, of (laughter) regulation.

Alex Barker
Kevin and Stanley see that as different from a Visa rule. But for performers like Stoya and Allie, there is no difference in practice, or in impact.

Allie Knox
It’s very hard for us to live stable lifestyles. We didn’t have to shoot for porn companies anymore. We didn’t have to have shitty agents. And then regulations came through and now we’re back to being fucked.

Patricia Nilsson
Visa and Mastercard clearly don’t make all these decisions, but they do shape the network and try to shape an approach. We’ve talked to lots of payment people for the series, but Kevin and Stanley, more than anyone else, helped us understand the mindset within the credit card duopoly, the psyche of a reluctant ruler.

Alex Barker
Are they the right people to be the kind of ultimate, you know, quasi-regulators of porn?

Kevin Smith
In the absence of anyone else, I would say yes. And that could be quite a ballsy answer. But at the end of the day, I think Visa, Mastercard, through their relationships, they have a good local understanding of what’s going on in this industry. Actually, it’s challenges and it’s constant evolution. I mean, there is a shared responsibility that says nobody wants to kill the industry, but it needs to make sure that as it moves forward, it’s doing so in a legally defensible way.

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Alex Barker
What Kevin described is a murky, self-regulating system that to some extent keeps porn in check. When he was at Visa, I could imagine he was more or less trying to do the right thing. And he worked in a system that by its very nature involves different interests that often balance one another. Picture who is sitting around the table. There will be Visa executives whose job it is to drum up more business and encourage more transactions. Then there will be people with a different outlook, teams managing risk, worrying about the brand or the legal consequences of using Visa’s power. Visa’s aim and frankly, the aim of the adult industry too, is to try to find a balance where money is flowing, but the risks in the system are managed.

Kevin Smith
There is a recognition that everyone needs everyone else. The whole thing is symbiotic. If one of the parties falls out, then the whole damn thing falls over.

Patricia Nilsson
Visa and Mastercard, almost by accident, have filled a power vacuum in the regulation of porn around the world. It’s such a peculiar position to be in. And to Stanley, it carries obvious risks. It’s difficult to judge when to intervene and when to hold back.

I mean, do you think that Visa and Mastercard, do you think they realise how much power they have, how people in the adult industry see them as their de facto regulator?

Stanley Skoglund
Yes, I think you may be on to something, that if you have worked in that position a long time and you don’t engage with the industry, yes, I think there’s absolutely a risk that you don’t understand, either the de facto power you have or how it is perceived. And perhaps that is something, would benefit perhaps Visa, Mastercard, to be more kind of self-critical in their reflection of how these programs and how these policies are implemented.

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Patricia Nilsson
Is there a better approach for Visa and Mastercard? We’ll try to do some critical reflection ourselves with a little help from the performer Stoya. That’s coming straight after the break.

Act three: Ruled by Stoya

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Alex Barker
We are near the end of our journey through the porn industry and we’re going back to the person who set us off at the beginning: the performer and artist Stoya. Her advice was invaluable, and at least for us, totally unforgettable.

Stoya
So if you try to make a podcast that’s about all of porn, it’s going to be scattered and messy and not make sense. You are the Financial Times. I suggest you stay in your lane. You focus on the business aspect. You focus on the finances.

Patricia Nilsson
Stay in your lane. At that point, we had secretive porn barons in our sights. Big empires pumping out porn to the world. Men who lived in the shadows. Fake names. No real public presence. People like Bernd Bergmair of Pornhub or Stephane Pacaud, the owner of XVideos. We thought they were the most powerful people in porn. But what we realised is that they aren’t the masters of their own fate. What we discovered is that the real rulers of porn were much closer to home: the credit card networks. And they were in plain sight. The porn barons have immense power and influence, sure, but always within boundaries defined by payment companies. Visa and Mastercard have the last word.

Alex Barker
Visa and Mastercard are truly vast corporations. Visa is the world’s biggest financial company, the single biggest. And Mastercard is something like the third. And let’s be frank. Visa and Mastercard aren’t wildly exciting companies, even for financial journalists. We all use them every day but give them as much attention as the plumbing in our house. But by examining the porn industry, we saw the incredible power these payment networks wield over the internet.

Stoya
Instead of the government defining what is and is not considered sexually acceptable, it’s a corporation. A credit card company is defining what is and is not sexually OK.

Alex Barker
If you think about what the core goal is on their part, it’s not necessarily, you know, the good of the community or society. It’s actually the protection of their brand and no fault of theirs. I mean, that’s what a company’s there to do. But that’s not necessarily the thing that we want to use (laughter) as our measure of whether pornography is OK or what kind of pornography is OK.

Stoya
Yeah. And, like, it feels like a really bad idea to be saying, like, actually, I think the government should pay more attention to porn, but I don’t think that Mastercard and Visa should be the decision makers on this.

Patricia Nilsson
We have spoken to people at these companies. We can tell you with absolute confidence that Visa and Mastercard don’t want to be the decision makers either. They oversee a system that sets standards for world porn, but they just hate doing it. They are trapped in this thankless job deciding and enforcing moral codes on sex. It goes against all their instincts.

Alex Barker
But what’s the alternative? Imagine the reaction if they did explicitly allow payments for videos that depicted rape. So if the question is who should rule porn, we probably don’t have much choice. Cryptocurrencies are still too clunky and expensive to usurp the role of credit cards in porn. And if crypto did take over, there might be no rules left at all. What about governments? They certainly have immense power over porn companies within their borders. But we’ve talked to regulators who are trying to tighten up rules around porn. They struggled to get the big porn platforms based in far off jurisdictions to even respond to their messages.

Patricia Nilsson
They don’t have the leverage of Visa and Mastercard, or the global reach. So in practice, Visa and Mastercard remain indispensable. There is nobody else. How should these payment networks use their power? There are some areas where Stoya, given the choice, might actually have taken a tougher approach, like with so-called fauxcest. If you’ve been on a porn site in recent years, you’ll have noticed that there is a craze for sexual fantasies about step relatives. Stoya wants to see less of it around. But then she also thinks decisions like this deserve an open debate, the kind of thing a government would have when making law.

Stoya
Call your senator and be like, hey, I actually wanna defend step incest porn because it’s a fantasy. And so we’re talking about thought crimes. And, you know, I think, I think Stoya is wrong. I think she’s being reactionary and, like, overstepping.

Alex Barker
But with payment companies in control, it’s impossible to have that kind of meaningful debate.

Stoya
You know, it’s not like I can go down to the Mastercard office and be like, Hello? I would like to have a civil dialogue about this. Like, that’s not gonna happen.

Alex Barker
This might be one of the things that can be improved: the arbitrary nature of that power. Visa and Mastercard may be reluctant morality police, but that’s no excuse for operating at times almost by stealth and issuing vague, catchall rules that are turned by payment networks into bizarrely precise, often inconsistent restrictions.

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We asked Mastercard for a recorded interview. They were helpful with background information, but in the end they declined. If we did have that conversation we’d probably start with some optimism. We’ve tracked a crazy era for the adult industry. Porn has gone from being scarce and expensive to being everywhere and mostly free, all within a generation.

Patricia Nilsson
And in business terms, you can finally see things kind of coming back together. The internet is giving performers more power and independence and most importantly, money. If that can improve their working conditions, that is surely welcome.

Alex Barker
We’ve seen how Visa and Mastercard oversee a regulatory system for porn. But who are these rules for? The truth is, they’re not designed to protect the performers. They’re not designed to protect the viewer. The rules are there to protect the Visa and Mastercard brands.

Patricia Nilsson
But it is the only system we have. How could it work better? We have one suggestion. This series has been about how big porn barons are reliant on Visa and Mastercard and how Visa and Mastercard are reluctant rulers of the porn barons. Those two things have created a really patchy system of rules and a weird situation where tube sites serving free porn have fewer restrictions than sites taking credit cards, even though tube sites are easier for underage people to access.

Alex Barker
If Visa and Mastercard said to an owner, you own tube sites, you own pay sites, we’re going to treat everything you own as one, that would be one way to be more consistent and bring in tighter standards on moderation to help lower the risk of unlawful videos appearing on tube sites. Don’t underestimate the power of Visa and Mastercard. When credit card companies call, even secretive pornographers would feel compelled to pick up the phone.

Patricia Nilsson
Because right now they don’t want to talk. And that brings me back to the one moment where I thought I heard the voice of the man who was the start of this whole journey: Bernd Bergmair, or BB, the ex-Goldman Sachs banker who I revealed was the secret owner of MindGeek. I was so excited to find his Hong Kong number. (Sound of phone ringing) I called, a man picked up. I like to think it was BB.

Hello? This is Patricia Nilsson from the Financial Times. Is this Bernd Bergmair?

As I introduced myself, in that split second, maybe he thought, What do I say? Do I have anything to hide from this reporter? A millennium of shame about sex and porn might have flashed across his mind. But then maybe he reconsidered. Things have changed. Porn is everywhere. Everyone watches it. It’s a business like any other. Is it time to explain what I do? He paused. And then, he hung up.

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Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson . . . 

Alex Barker
And me, Alex Barker. Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer. Edith Rousselot is our associate producer. Our editor is Karen Shakerdge. Amanda Kay Wang is our engineer. Music composition by Pascal Wyse. Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez Cruzado. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

At Pushkin Industries, special thanks to Mia Lobel, Leital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton, Heather Fain, Jon Schnaars, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Eric Sandler, Jake Flanagin, Jordyn McMillin, Mary Beth Smith, Isabella Narvaez, Shawn Carney, Carly Migliori, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lakhan, Nicole Morano and Jacob Weisberg.

Patricia Nilsson
At the Financial Times, special thanks to Renée Kaplan and Roula Khalaf, Alastair Mackie, Kendra James, Nigel Hanson, Molly Eisner, Rhonda Taylor, Breen Turner, Nicola Stansfield, Peter Spiegel, Philippa Goodrich, Kevin Wilson, Carolina Vargas, Manuela Saragosa, Topher Forhecz, Laura Clarke, Matt Garrahan, Andrew Georgiades, Petros Gioumpasis, Richard Martin, Barney Jopson, Daniel Dombey, Cynthia O’Murchu and Wojciech Michalak.

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