Wellington, New Zealand — A New Zealand courtroom has rejected the most recent bid by web entrepreneur Kim Dotcom to halt his deportation to the US on costs associated to his file-sharing web site Megaupload.
Dotcom had requested the Excessive Court docket to evaluate the legality of an official’s August 2024 resolution that he must be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial on costs of copyright infringement, cash laundering and racketeering. It was the most recent chapter in a protracted 13-year battle by the U.S. authorities to extradite the Finnish-German millionaire from New Zealand.
The Megaupload founder had utilized for what in New Zealand is named a judicial evaluate, by which a decide is requested to guage whether or not an official’s resolution was lawful.
KATE DWEK/AFP/Getty
A decide on Wednesday dismissed Dotcom’s arguments that the choice to deport him was politically motivated and that he would face grossly disproportionate therapy within the U.S. In a written ruling, Justice Christine Grice additionally rejected Dotcom’s declare that New Zealand’s police had been flawed to cost his enterprise companions, however not him, beneath home legal guidelines – which doubtless yielded laxer sentences than if the boys had been tried within the U.S.
The most recent resolution could possibly be challenged within the Court docket of Attraction, the place a deadline for submitting is Oct. 8. It wasn’t instantly clear if Dotcom would achieve this.
One in every of his attorneys, Ron Mansfield, instructed Radio New Zealand that Dotcom’s group had “a lot battle left in us as we search to safe a good end result,” however he did not elaborate.
Neither Dotcom nor Mansfield responded to a request for remark from The Related Press on Thursday.
New Zealand’s authorities hasn’t disclosed what is going to occur subsequent within the extradition course of or divulged an anticipated timeline for Dotcom to be surrendered to the US.
The saga stretches again to the January 2012 arrest by New Zealand authorities of Dotcom in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion, together with different firm officers, on the request of the FBI. U.S. prosecutors stated Megaupload raked in at the least $175 million, primarily from individuals who used the positioning to illegally obtain songs, tv exhibits and films, earlier than the FBI shut it down earlier that 12 months.
Attorneys for Dotcom and the others arrested argued that it was the customers of the positioning, based in 2005, who selected to pirate materials, not its founders. However prosecutors stated the boys had been the architects of an unlimited felony enterprise, with the Division of Justice describing it as the biggest felony copyright case in U.S. historical past.
He has been free on bail in New Zealand since February 2012.
Interviewed at his sprawling dwelling by 60 Minutes in 2014, Dotcom instructed correspondent Bob Simon that he was impressed to hunt his riches by the James Bond films, “the place, , some characters had non-public islands and tremendous tankers transformed into yachts and house stations and underwater houses. So, , I received impressed by that.”
“However you are not enjoying James Bond, you are enjoying Dr. No,” steered Simon.
“That is what all people says,” replied the net entrepreneur.
Dotcom and his enterprise companions fought the FBI’s efforts to extradite them for years, together with by difficult New Zealand regulation enforcement’s actions in the course of the investigation and arrests. In 2021, nonetheless, New Zealand’s Supreme Court docket dominated that Dotcom and two different males could possibly be surrendered.
Below New Zealand regulation, it remained as much as the nation’s justice minister to determine if the extradition ought to proceed. The minister, Paul Goldsmith, dominated in August 2024 that it ought to.
However by then, Dotcom was the one particular person whose destiny remained in query. Two of his former enterprise companions, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, pleaded responsible to costs towards them in a New Zealand courtroom in June 2023 and had been sentenced to 2 and a half years in jail.
In change, U.S. efforts to extradite them had been dropped. A part of Dotcom’s newest authorized bid challenged the police resolution to not lengthen a plea deal beneath New Zealand legal guidelines to him, too.
Grice rejected that, saying the selection to solely cost Ortmann and van der Kolk in New Zealand was “a correct train of the Police’s discretion.” The jurist additionally dismissed Dotcom’s declare that Goldsmith’s extradition resolution was politically motivated.
Prosecutors earlier deserted their extradition bid towards a fourth Megaupload officer, Finn Batato, who was arrested in New Zealand. Batato returned to Germany, the place he died from most cancers in 2022.
In November 2024, Dotcom stated in a put up on X that he had suffered a stroke. He wrote on X in July that he was making “good progress” in his restoration however nonetheless suffered from speech and reminiscence impairments.
Goldsmith’s resolution that Dotcom must be extradited was made earlier than the stroke. However Grice stated the minister had thought-about different “important well being circumstances” Dotcom confronted and wasn’t flawed to conclude that these should not stop him from being deported.
