In Re: Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation

── In Re: Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Date: May 04, 2026 Category: General 24-2678 In Re: Payment Card Interchange Fee and Merchant Discount Antitrust Litigation United States Court of Appeals For the Second Circuit August Term 2025 Argued: November 20, 2025 Decided: May 4, 2026 No. 24-2678 OLD JERICHO ENTERPRISE, INC., 32T, LLC, BUCKS, INC., CHANDLER OIL-1 CORPORATION, COFFEE CUP FUEL STOP, INC., H&H ENTERPRISES, INC., HEINZ ENTERPRISES, INC., KOEHNENS STANDARD SERVICE, INC., MINERAL SPRING AVENUE GETTY, INC., MOX LLC, OKY LLC, PIT ROW, INC., POINTE SERVICE CENTER LLC, RED EAGLE, INC., VICTORY ENERGY, LLC, VILLAGE CENTER AUTO CARE, INC., W.L.F. AUTOMOTIVE, INC., WESCO, INC., ZARCO USA, INC., ON BEHALF OF ALL OTHERS SIMILARLY SITUATED, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. VISA, INC., MASTERCARD, INC., Defendants-Appellees.* *The Clerk of Court is respectfully directed to amend the caption accordingly.  Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York Nos. 05-md-1720; 20-cv-02394 Margo K. Brodie, Chief Judge. Before: JACOBS, LEVAL, and PARK, Circuit Judges. In 2019, Visa and Mastercard agreed to pay $5.6 billion to settle a federal antitrust class action with a class of merchants that accepted payment cards during the class period. Appellants here (the “Old Jericho Plaintiffs”) did not opt out of the Settlement Agreement. But a year later they filed their own putative class action complaint asserting state-law antitrust claims and seeking damages for the same allegedly supra-competitive interchange fees based on the same alleged antitrust violations. They contend that their gasoline suppliers are the direct payors of the challenged fees and the appropriate class members. The district court (Brodie, C.J.) concluded that the Old Jericho Plaintiffs are members of the settlement class and the Settlement Agreement bars the claims they now assert. We AFFIRM. First, we reject the Old Jericho Plaintiffs’ contention that our prior decision in Fikes Wholesale, Inc. v. HSBC Bank USA, N.A., 62 F.4th 704 (2d Cir. 2023), requires the district court to determine class membership solely by identifying the “direct payor” of the challenged fees. The district court did not clearly err in determining that the settling parties intended to include the Old Jericho Plaintiffs in the settlement class. Second, we conclude that the Old Jericho Plaintiffs’ claims were validly released because they were adequately represented in the Settlement Agreement and rest on the same factual predicate as the other released claims. 2  CHRISTOPHER BATEMAN (Daniel Gifford on the brief), Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, New York, NY; Manuel J. Dominguez, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Palm Beach Gardens, FL, for Plaintiffs-Appellants. KANNON K. SHANMUGAM (Kenneth A. Gallo on the brief), Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, Washington, DC; Brette Tannenbaum, Nina Kovalenko, Gary R. Carney, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, New York, NY, for Defendant-Appellee Mastercard Incorporated. Michael S. Shuster, Demian A. Ordway, Jayme Jonat, Gregory J. Dubinsky, Holwell Shuster & Goldberg LLP, New York, NY; Matthew A. Eisenstein, Rosemary Szanyi, R. Stanton Jones, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, Washington, DC, for Defendant-Appellee Visa Inc. PARK, Circui