Ukraine fines Pornhub – MP
Ukraine has fined Canadian adult content giant PornHub $5,543 for refusing to pay taxes in the country and by extension failing to support the national armed forces, a senior MP has reported.
Daniil Getmantsev, the chair of the parliamentary committee for financial affairs, reported the penalty imposed by the Ukrainian tax service on Monday on social media. He contrasted PornHub’s fiscal irresponsibility to the discipline of OnlyFans, a site catering to adult content producers. It paid over $944,000 in taxes in Ukraine in 2023, the MP noted.
“Every penny under the so-called ‘tax on Google’ goes to financing the needs of our army, and Ukraine is rated 14th among other nations in user views,” Getmantsev stressed.
The ‘tax on Google’ was introduced in Ukraine in 2021. Foreign companies providing e-services to residents and earning over a certain threshold are required to register as taxpayers under a special procedure and pay added value tax.
The ranking cited by the MP came from PornHub itself, which published its end-of-the-year report last week. Ukraine was among the top 20 nations in terms of traffic.
The website revealed profiles of user preferences for each country on the list. According to it, Ukrainians demonstrated a massive boost in interest in hentai – animated pornography using Japanese visual style – as did PornHub users worldwide.
In terms of relative categories, a comparison of which varieties of pornography are viewed more compared to other parts of the world, “Russian” was the second-highest, at +322%.
The production, sale and distribution of pornography have technically been banned in Ukraine since 2009, but the law is largely not enforced. MP Maksim Buzhansky argued for legalization earlier this year, contending that a situation where OnlyFans pays taxes while its Ukrainian content creators can be prosecuted is ridiculous.
PornHub’s parent company Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, expected to generate about $455 million in revenue in 2022, according to a story published by the news outlet Semafor in July.
The firm owns several notable adult entertainment assets, including platforms RedTube and YouPorn, as well as the studios Brazzers and Digital Playground.
