Kim Dotcom, who faces criminal charges related to the defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, will be extradited to the United States, New Zealand’s justice minister said, potentially ending more than a decade of legal wrangling.
German-born Dotcom is a New Zealand resident and has been fighting extradition to the United States since 2012, after the FBI ordered a raid on his Auckland mansion. New Zealand’s Supreme Court first approved his extradition in 2017, and an appeals court reaffirmed the decision the following year. In 2020, the country’s Supreme Court again upheld the decision, but opened the door to a new round of judicial review.
Now Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesman said on Thursday.
“I have considered all the information carefully and have decided that Dotcom should be surrendered to the United States to stand trial,” Goldsmith said. “As is standard practice, I have given Dotcom a short period of time to consider and receive advice on my decision. I will therefore not be making any further comment at this stage.”
Dotcom posted on X on Tuesday: “The obedient US colony in the South Pacific has just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,” in what appeared to be a reference to the extradition order. He did not respond to further requests for comment.
In addition to copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. Dotcom has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringements committed through his site, a file-sharing service that allowed users to upload content and share the link with others for download.
“New Zealand’s copyright law (92b) makes it clear that an ISP cannot be held criminally liable for the actions of its users,” Dotcom said in 2017, after the high court ruled against him for the first time. “Unless you’re Kim Dotcom?” The high court disagreed, arguing that under New Zealand law the conduct could be classified as a type of fraud, opening the door to Dotcom’s extradition.
US authorities allege that Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500m (about £390m) by encouraging users to pay to store and share copyrighted material, generating more than $175m in revenue for the website.
The site was officially based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain names and shut down the website. But it survived and was relaunched in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name. Dotcom has had no involvement in the company since at least 2015; it now markets itself as an “online privacy” service and is run by a New Zealander, Shane Te Pou (aka Shane Phillips), who joined as human resources director.
Megaupload’s marketing director, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, Dutchman Bram van der Kolk, were arrested in Auckland with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and Van der Kolk reached plea deals and were sentenced in 2023 to prison terms in New Zealand, but were allowed to avoid extradition. Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.