Nancy Pelosi’s husband unloaded more than $500,000 worth of Visa stock — less than three months before the credit card giant was slapped with federal antitrust charges, public documents show.
Visa was hit with a lawsuit on Tuesday that alleged the company has illegally monopolized the debit card market — the culmination of a years-long review conducted by the Justice Department’s antitrust unit.
Visa allegedly used its dominant market position to penalize customers and merchants who use competing payment processors, according to court papers.
Antitrust cops also allege that Visa forces financial tech firms to work with it by threatening to penalize those who don’t.
The Post has sought comment from Visa.
Meanwhile, Christopher Josephs, the tech entrepreneur who runs the “Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker” on X, posted a screenshot of a congressional filing on July 3 which showed that the former House speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, had sold 2,000 shares of Visa worth between $500,000 and $1 million.
The disclosure form shows that Pelosi’s transaction is marked “SP,” or spouse — a reference to husband Paul, the San Francisco-based venture capitalist and real estate investor.
At the time Paul Pelosi sold Visa stock, there was no public indication that an antitrust lawsuit against the company was imminent.
Shares of Visa were off 5% in late Tuesday trading.
“Speaker Pelosi does not own any stocks, and she has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,” the congresswoman’s spokesperson told The Post.
Nevertheless, critics have claimed that Nancy Pelosi’s perch in Washington gives her potential access to non-public information that is relevant to the markets.
“At various critical inflection points in history, members of our government have engaged in trading at a time which their conflicts are called into question,” Ron Geffner, a former enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission, told The Post.
Geffner said that the appearance of impropriety should be tempered when taking other factors into consideration.
“Before public opinion judges Pelosi unfairly, it is important to determine who engaged in the transaction on her behalf as well as whether it was part of a broader change of her portfolio,” Geffner added.
The July 3 disclosure also revealed that Paul Pelosi sold 2,500 shares of Tesla. At the same time, he bought up stock in Nvidia and Broadcom.
Nancy Pelosi, who remains a key Democratic Party power broker despite stepping down from the House speakership early last year, has a nine-figure net worth on account of her and her husband’s extensive stock and investment portfolio.
The San Francisco Democrat has long resisted calls from a bipartisan group of lawmakers to ban legislators and their spouses from trading stock given the inherent conflict of interest.
In 2021, Visa revealed in a regulatory filing that the Justice Department’s antitrust unit requested information on potential violations of laws governing competitive behavior in the marketplace, according to Financial Times.
Federal antitrust investigators are reportedly looking into Visa’s relationships with companies such as Square, Stripe and PayPal.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Visa is alleged to have offered those companies financial incentives to prevent those firms from using competitive payment processors.
The Justice Department was reportedly keen on examining whether PayPal was coerced by Visa to encourage customers to make payments using Visa-branded cards.
Visa is also alleged to have offered lower fees and other incentives to Square subsidiary Cash App on condition that it steer customers toward making transactions using Visa-branded services.
Visa said that it was asked to hand over information pertaining to the company’s conduct in its US-based debit card business.
“We believe Visa’s US debit practices are in compliance with applicable laws,” the company said at the time.
Last year, Visa said that federal prosecutors sought even more documents as part of the same investigation.
The San Francisco-based company said at the time that it was cooperating with the investigation.
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