Adrian Delia and partner Georg Sapiano make most of their money from a porn billing hub

If a porn company anywhere in the world wants to make money online, it has to go through Ron Cadwell, who CNBC named one of the most powerful men in porn.

His company, CCBill LLC – he owns it with his sister Stephanie and he is the CEO – handles online billing for porn sites. They have a virtual monopoly in the market because that’s a line of business which most other online billing (payment transaction) companies avoid.

When people pay for porn online, their card transaction goes through CCBill, which processes more than US$1 billion in transactions every year. Once a year, Ron Cadwell organises The Phoenix Forum, a conference for the online porn industry.

And where are the payments processed? They’re processed through Malta. CCBill EU, Ltd and CCBill EU Holdings, Ltd (the commas are not an error) are Malta-registered companies housed at a nondescript office address in Palm Street, Paola. Adrian Delia and his law partner, Georg Sapiano, set up the companies for Ron Cadwell and Stephanie Cadwell in 2002, using their fiduciary services company called Aequitas Trust & Fiduciary Ltd.

This was at the same time that Delia was laundering £1.4 million from a London prostitution racket through his bank account at Barclays International in Jersey, for his client Eucharist Bajada and his younger brother Emanuel Bajada, who worked for him – and now pretends to have known nothing about it.

Delia and Sapiano run the CCBill porn-billing operation in Malta, for which they bill Ron Cadwell heavily. This website was unable to discover whether Cadwell/CCBill pays them outside Malta or whether they keep a percentage of the business transacted in Malta.

But Delia’s self-disclosed precarious financial situation with Maltese banks reveals no sign of the generous income stream from the Shadwell’s porn-billing empire, indicating that it may have gone elsewhere – bearing in mind that he had an offshore bank account at Barclays International in Jersey contemporaneously with the first few years at least of this Malta porn-billing operation.