Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” But any violations of the law that WikiLeaks either encourages, promotes, facilitates, etc. are apparently not of interest to Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation, the principal collector of funds and de facto financial manager of WikiLeaks. At any rate, this appears to be the case for any violations of American law. German law, as will be seen below, is another matter.

According to Winfried Motzkus, the chair of the Wau Holland Foundation’s board of directors, the foundation has thus far collected some €750,000 for WikiLeaks or nearly a million dollars at current exchange rates. The foundation allegedly disburses funds to WikiLeaks upon the submission of receipts for specific costs. The PayPal account used by WikiLeaks was in fact the account of the Wau Holland Foundation. Clicking the PayPal link on this WikiLeaks donations page still takes one to the now blocked foundation account of the Wau Holland Foundation. In a press release, the foundation has acknowledged the freezing of its account and threatened legal action against PayPal.