Kim Dotcom loses 12-year fight to stop deportation from New Zealand to face US copyright case

WELLINGTON – Kim Dotcom, the founder of the once wildly popular file-sharing site Megaupload, lost a 12-year battle this week to stop his deportation from New Zealand to the US on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racket.

New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith disclosed on Friday that he had decided Dotcom should be extradited to the US to stand trial, ending – for now – a long-running legal battle. A date for extradition has not been set, and Goldsmith said Dotcom would be given “a short period of time to consider and take advice” on the decision.

“Don’t worry, I have a plan,” Dotcom posted on X this week. He did not elaborate, although a member of his legal team, Ira Rothken, wrote on the website that a bid for a judicial review – in which a New Zealand judge would be asked to assess Goldsmith’s decision – was being prepared.

The saga stretches back to the 2012 arrest of Dotcom in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion, along with other company officers. Prosecutors said Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mostly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, TV shows and movies — before the FBI shut it down earlier that year.

Lawyers for the Finnish-German millionaire and the others arrested argued that users of the site, founded in 2005, chose to pirate the material, not its founders. But prosecutors argued the men were the architects of a vast criminal enterprise, with the Justice Department describing it as the largest copyright criminal case in US history.

The men fought the order for years – criticizing the investigation and the arrests – but in 2021 New Zealand’s Supreme Court ruled that Dotcom and two other men could be extradited. It was up to the country’s justice minister to decide whether the extradition should go ahead.

Three of Goldsmith’s predecessors have not announced a decision. Goldsmith was appointed justice minister in November after New Zealand’s government changed following an election.

“We have received extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter” and have carefully reviewed all information, Goldsmith said in his statement.

“I love New Zealand. I’m not leaving,” German-born Dotcom wrote on Thursday. He did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Two of his former business partners, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, pleaded guilty to the charges against them in a New Zealand court in June 2023 and were sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Instead, US efforts to extradite him were dropped.

Prosecutors previously dropped an extradition request against a fourth company officer, Finn Batato, who was arrested in New Zealand. Batato returned to Germany, where he died of cancer in 2022.

In 2015, Megaupload computer programmer Andrus Nomm from Estonia pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and was sentenced to one year and one day in US federal prison.