Kim Dotcom loses 12-year battle against deportation from New Zealand and now faces US copyright dispute

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Kim Dotcom, founder of the once hugely popular file-sharing website Megaupload, this week lost a 12-year battle to prevent his deportation from New Zealand to the United States. He is accused of copyright infringement, money laundering and organized crime.

New Zealand's Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced on Friday that he had decided to extradite Dotcom to the United States to face trial, ending a lengthy legal battle – for now. No extradition date has been set, and Goldsmith said Dotcom would be given “a short period of time to consider the decision and seek advice.”

“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 site that an application for a judicial review – in which a New Zealand judge would be asked to evaluate Goldsmith's decision – was being prepared.

The saga stretches back to Dotcom's arrest in 2012 in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion, along with other company officials. Prosecutors said Megaupload took 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 this year.

The lawyers of the Finnish-German millionaire and the other detainees had argued that it was the users of the website, founded in 2005, who had chosen to pirate the content, and not its founders. But prosecutors argued that the men were the architects of a huge criminal enterprise. The Justice Department spoke of the largest copyright case in US history.

The men fought the order for years, criticizing the investigations and arrests. But in 2021, New Zealand's Supreme Court ruled that Dotcom and two other men could be extradited. It was left to the country's justice minister to decide whether extradition should proceed.

Three of Goldsmith's predecessors did not announce their decisions. Goldsmith was appointed Minister for Justice in November following an election that resulted in a change of government in New Zealand.

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

“I love New Zealand. I'm not leaving,” the German-born Dotcom wrote on X 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 in a New Zealand court in June 2023 and were sentenced to two and a half years in prison. In return, US efforts to extradite them were dropped.

Prosecutors had previously abandoned their extradition request against a fourth senior executive of the company, Finn Batato, who had been arrested in New Zealand. Batato returned to Germany, where he died of cancer in 2022.

In 2015, Estonian-born Megaupload computer programmer Andrus Nomm pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated copyright infringement and was sentenced to one year and one day in a U.S. federal prison.