Kim Dotcom has offered the FBI a deal in regards his extradition, which was postponed yesterday. The hearing had been set for August 6th 2012 but was delayed by the US to March 2013, which is very surprising seeing just how much effort they had gone to thus far. The four accused – Dotcom, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk – deny any wrongdoing.
Mr Dotcom stated to The New Zealand Herald today that he was more than willing to attend a court in the US as long as he and his co-defendants were given a guarantee of a fair trial as well as unfreezing his assets, so that he can defend himself. The unfreezing of these assets is critical now as he currently has 22 lawyers working for him, and they need to be payed. Also, the families of his co-defendants also need to be supported. Kim also stated that his legal bills are now amounting to millions of dollars.
“They will never agree to this and that is because they can’t win this case and they know that already” stated Mr Dotcom. ”They are sitting on all my money. I have no money to pay my lawyers. Every move they make, they know I have to send my lawyers there. They make it so I have no chance in the long run to defend myself. Lawyers need money too.”
Mr Dotcom, along with Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato and Bram van der Kolk were first arrested on 19 January 2012 in what turned out to be an unlawful arrest procedure as well as unlawful seizure of property. On Friday 16th March 2012 New Zealand Judge, Justice Judith Potter in the High Court declared the order used to seize Dotcom’s property “null and void” after it was discovered that the police had acted under a court order that should have never been granted.
Yesterday after hearing about the delayed extradition hearing, Kim tweeted, ”Extradition hearing delayed til March. Dirty delay tactics by the US. They destroyed my business. Took all my assets. Time does the rest.”.
It seems like the US now knows what everyone else knew, in that they can’t win this case as he isn’t the villain that the press has tried to make him out to be. He simply created an innovative way for people to be able to store and share files; something that Hollywood is desperately trying to stamp out as people may use these cyber-lockers to infringe on copyrighted materials. Past users of Megaupload, aided by organisations like the EFF, are still trying to get their data back from the US.
