Kim Dotcom Online for New Taxpayer Payment After Court Finds Errors Made in Over 52 Privacy Act Applications

Kim Dotcom’s five-year battle over the denial of Privacy Act requests to 52 government agencies will end in her receiving a payment for damages.

It is not the first time that the German businessman has recovered taxpayer money after persecuting the government in court over decisions made during the eight years, so far, the extradition process.

The Court of Appeal found that the John Key government erred in transferring all of those requests to Attorney General Chris Finlayson in 2015, just before the extradition hearing that found Dotcom to be responsible for the extradition to the United States.

Instead, the Court of Appeal has determined that the requests should have been handled by the agencies and that it was not legal to transfer the requests to Finlayson simply because he was the Crown’s legal counsel.

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Dotcom and three other people, Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, are facing extradition to the United States on charges related to an accusation of massive copyright infringement via the Megaupload website.

Megaupload was shut down in 2012 and the four men were arrested in a global operation run by the FBI. If extradited to the United States and convicted, all four face decades in jail.

The government had argued that the Attorney General was the right place to handle requests, as it was the agency most closely related to the information, a finding based on its role in seeking Dotcom’s extradition to the United States.

Dotcom has said he made the Privacy Act requests in 2015 to find out what government agencies had been saying about him. The requests were made just before his initial extradition hearing in district court, and he has said he was seeking information that would expose what he believes was a conspiracy to have him extradited to the United States.

The government’s argument at the time was that Dotcom had filed the request as a delaying tactic at the extradition hearing. He has denied any conspiracy.

The Court of Appeal ruled that the agencies that received the requests actually had the requested information, so it was up to them to respond. It found that it was not legal to transfer applications to the Attorney General as the central agency simply because Crown Law was the government’s legal counsel.

The Court of Appeal also found that it might be lawful to reject Privacy Act requests in some circumstances where the requests were considered to be intrusive and no “reasonable person” could accept that they were made in “good faith.”

The Court of Appeal has sent the case to the Human Rights Court to resolve the damages for interference with your privacy. The original court ruled in favor of Dotcom.

Dotcom just had mixed success in the Supreme Court with the conclusion that he and three others involved in his file-sharing site Megaupload were responsible for the extradition, but had not had a fair hearing earlier in the process.

The Supreme Court ruled that the four defendants facing extradition should have the opportunity to have their arguments heard before the extradition order, if still valid, is passed to the Minister of Justice, Kris Faafoi, for to act.

Even if the extradition order is signed by Faafoi, it is expected that years will pass before the case comes to an end in New Zealand.