Kim Dotcom, who is facing criminal charges relating to the defunct filesharing website Megaupload, is to be extradited to the US, the New Zealand justice minister says, which could end more than a decade of legal wrangling.
German-born Dotcom has New Zealand residency and has been fighting extradition to the US since 2012 after an FBI-ordered raid on his Auckland mansion. The high court in New Zealand first approved his extradition in 2017, with an appeal court reaffirming the finding the year after. In 2020, the country’s supreme court again affirmed the finding but opened the door for a fresh round of judicial review.
Now, the justice minister, Paul Goldsmith, has signed an extradition order for Dotcom, a spokesperson said on Thursday.
“I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial,” Goldsmith said. “As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage.”
Dotcom posted on X on Tuesday: “The obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload,” in what appears to be a reference to the extradition order. He did not reply to further requests for comment.
As well as copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his site, a filesharing service that allowed users to upload content and share the link with others to download.
“New Zealand copyright law (92b) makes it clear that an ISP can’t be criminally liable for actions of their users,” Dotcom said in 2017, after the high court first ruled against him. “Unless you’re Kim Dotcom?” The high court disagreed, arguing that under New Zealand law, the conduct could be categorised as a type of fraud, opening the way to Dotcom’s extradition.
US authorities say Dotcom and three other Megaupload executives cost film studios and record companies more than $500m (about £390m) by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted material, which generated more than $175m in revenue for the website.
The site was formally based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain names and closed down the website. But it survived, relaunching in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name. Dotcom has had no involvement in the company since at least 2015; it now bills itself as an “online privacy” service and is run by a New Zealander, Shane Te Pou (also known as Shane Phillips), who joined as its human resources director.
Megaupload’s chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortmann, both from Germany, along with a third executive, the Dutch national Bram van der Kolk, were arrested in Auckland with Dotcom in 2012.
Ortmann and Van der Kolk entered plea deals and were sentenced in 2023 to jail terms in New Zealand but allowed to avoid extradition. Batato died in 2022 in New Zealand.
