Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom's latest legal bid to halt deportation from New Zealand is rejected

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A New Zealand court has rejected the latest bid by internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom to halt his deportation to the United States on charges related to his file-sharing website Megaupload.

Dotcom had asked the High Court to review the legality of an official’s August 2024 decision that he should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering. It was the latest chapter in a protracted 13-year battle by the U.S. government to extradite the Finnish-German millionaire from New Zealand.

The Megaupload founder had applied for what in New Zealand is called a judicial review, in which a judge is asked to evaluate whether an official's decision was lawful.

A judge on Wednesday dismissed Dotcom's arguments that the decision to deport him was politically motivated and that he would face grossly disproportionate treatment in the U.S. In a written ruling, Justice Christine Grice also rejected Dotcom's claim that New Zealand's police were wrong to charge his business partners, but not him, under domestic laws — which likely yielded laxer sentences than if the men had been tried in the U.S.

The latest decision could be challenged in the Court of Appeal, where a deadline for filing is Oct. 8. It wasn't immediately clear if Dotcom would do so.

One of his lawyers, Ron Mansfield, told Radio New Zealand that Dotcom's team had "much fight left in us as we seek to secure a fair outcome,” but didn't elaborate further. Neither Dotcom nor Mansfield responded to a request for comment from The Associated Press on Thursday.

New Zealand’s government hasn’t disclosed what will happen next in the extradition process or divulged an expected timeline for Dotcom to be surrendered to the United States.

The saga stretches back to the January 2012 arrest by New Zealand authorities of Dotcom in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion along with other company officers at the request of the FBI. U.S. prosecutors said Megaupload raked in at least $175 million, mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies, before the FBI shut it down earlier that year.

Lawyers for Dotcom and the others arrested argued that it was the users of the site, founded in 2005, who chose to pirate material, not its founders. But prosecutors said the men were the architects of a vast criminal enterprise, with the Department of Justice describing it as the largest criminal copyright case in U.S. history.

He has been free on bail in New Zealand since February 2012.

Dotcom and his business partners fought the FBI's efforts to extradite them for years, including by challenging New Zealand law enforcement's actions during the investigation and arrests. In 2021, however, New Zealand’s Supreme Court ruled that Dotcom and two other men could be surrendered.

Under New Zealand law, it remained up to the country’s justice minister to decide if the extradition should proceed. The minister, Paul Goldsmith, ruled in August 2024 that it should.

But by then, Dotcom was the only person whose fate remained in question. Two of his former business partners, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, pleaded guilty to charges against them in a New Zealand court in June 2023 and were sentenced to two and a half years in jail.

In exchange, U.S. efforts to extradite them were dropped. Part of Dotcom's latest legal bid challenged the police decision not to extend a plea deal under New Zealand laws to him too.

Grice rejected that, saying the choice to only charge Ortmann and van der Kolk in New Zealand was “a proper exercise of the Police's discretion.” The jurist also dismissed Dotcom's claim that Goldsmith's extradition decision was politically motivated.

Prosecutors earlier abandoned their extradition bid against a fourth Megaupload officer, Finn Batato, who was arrested in New Zealand. Batato returned to Germany, where he died from cancer in 2022.

In November 2024, Dotcom said in a post on X that he had suffered a stroke. He wrote on X in July that he was making “good progress” in his recovery but still suffered from speech and memory impairments.

Goldsmith's decision that Dotcom should be extradited was made before the stroke. But Grice said the minister had considered other “significant health conditions” Dotcom faced and wasn't wrong to conclude that these shouldn't prevent him from being deported.

“I am pleased my decision has been upheld,” Goldsmith said Thursday in a written statement.