Today, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand rejected a ruling by a lower court regarding the search warrants used on the arrest of Kim Dotcom at his home. Bloomberg said the initial rulling had deemed that the arrest warrants used by New Zealand authorities for Dotcom's arrest were illegal and overly broad.
Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload.com, a file-sharing website which led him to get indicted in Virginia in January two years ago over charges ranging from racketeering, money laundering, fraud and copyright infringement, Bloomberg said. The news agency said that if the appeal ruling had sided with the initial lower court decision, the seizure of evidence and the arrest of Dotcom would have been deemed illegal and further dampened the US government's efforts to extradite him.
The former Kim Schmitz, who had been New Zealand resident and changed his name legally, could be facing a maximum of 20 years in jail per conviction of the racketeering and money laundering charges filed against him in the US, Bloomberg said.
The New Zealand Ministry of Justice said that when based on history, should the current country law prohibiting unreasonable searches was breached, its remedy would have been the prima facie exclusion of evidence seized in later criminal proceedings.
"It is clear that Mr. Dotcom understood from the warrants and the police explanations that allegations of copyright infringement were involved. The defects in the search warrants were not so radical as to require the warrants to be treated as nullities. Rather, they were defects in form, not substance," the appeal panel said.
In a Twitter post today just after the ruling, Ira Rothken, a lawyer for Dotcom, said that their legal team will be reviewing the ruling made by the Higher Court and could seek an appeal with the country's Supreme Court.
