New Zealand’s top court is to hear Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s final appeal against extradition to the US on fraud and online piracy charges, judges said yesterday.
The German national, who is accused of netting millions from his file-sharing empire, faces charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering in the US, carrying jail terms of up to 20 years.
A panel of five New Zealand Supreme Court judges unanimously rejected an argument from lawyers representing the US that they did not have the power to hear appeals from Dotcom and his three co-accused.
“We conclude that we have jurisdiction to entertain the proposed appeals,” the judges said in a written judgement.
The Supreme Court is Dotcom’s last avenue of legal appeal in New Zealand. Had the judges accepted the US argument, he would have been out of options.
However, the decision means that he has one more chance to overturn a court ruling that he should be sent to the US to face charges.
The extradition order has already been upheld by two appeal courts in a marathon case that began when armed police raided Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland, New Zealand, in January 2012.
No date has yet been set for the Supreme Court appeal hearing.
The FBI-led case has accused Dotcom of industrial-scale online piracy via Megaupload, which US authorities shut down when the raid took place.
They have alleged that the file-sharing service netted more than US$175 million in criminal proceeds and cost copyright owners more than US$500 million by offering pirated content, including films and music.
Dotcom and his co-accused — Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk — have denied any wrongdoing and have said that Megaupload was targeted because established interests were threatened by online innovation.
The Web site was an early example of cloud computing, allowing users to upload large files onto a server so others could easily download them without clogging up their e-mail systems.
At its height in 2011, Megaupload claimed to have 50 million daily users and account for 4 percent of the world’s Internet traffic.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS