Prior to his arrest in New Zealand, he enjoyed a luxurious life. He changed his surname to Dotcom in 2005. His mother was Finnish, from Turku, so he holds a Finnish passport and has siblings in Finland. The party contested the 2014 New Zealand general election under an electoral alliance with the Mana Movement and contested the 2017 general election independently, but failed to win any seats at either election.ĭotcom was born Kim Schmitz in 1974 in Kiel in the north of Germany in what was then politically West Germany. He also started and funded the Internet Party. In 2013, Dotcom launched another cloud storage service called Mega, although he later severed all ties with the service in 2015. Dotcom appealed to the Supreme Court of New Zealand, which ruled in 2020 that Dotcom could be extradited to the United States, but that he and three co-defendants were entitled to challenge the decision through a judicial review.
In 2018, the New Zealand Court of Appeal upheld the lower court's ruling. Dotcom denies any wrongdoing and has accused US authorities of pursuing a vendetta against him on behalf of politically influential Hollywood studios. In 2017, a New Zealand court ruled that Dotcom, as well as co-accused Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Carter Edwards, could be extradited to the US on fraud charges related to Megaupload. Dotcom posted bail and has been going through legal proceedings ever since to avoid extradition to the United States. Dotcom was residing in New Zealand at the time at the request of US authorities, New Zealand police raided his home in 2012 and arrested him. The company was financially successful, but in 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized its website and pressed charges against Dotcom, including criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud. He first rose to fame in Germany in the 1990s as an Internet entrepreneur and was convicted on charges of computer fraud in 1994.ĭotcom is the founder and former CEO of the now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload (2005–2012).
Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz, 21 January 1974), also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, is a German- Finnish Internet entrepreneur and political activist who resides in Queenstown, New Zealand.
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