Dotcom and Megaupload executives accused of money laundering

New Zealand’s Crown lawyer Christine Gordon Tuesday accused Kim Dotcom, founder of the nowclosed internet portal Megaupload, and three of his associates of money laundering through expenditure on luxury goods.

Dotcom and former Megaupload executives, Bram van der Kolk, Mathias Ortmann and Finn Batato, are facing trial to extradite them from New Zealand to the U.S. on 13 charges related to internet piracy, organized crime and money laundering.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Gordon, who is also representing the U.S. government, described financial transactions of the accused between New Zealand, Hong Kong and the U.S. as money laundering.

The transactions include Batato buying a luxury car in 2009 for $92,970 as a Christmas gift for Dotcom’s mother, who lives in Germany and renting a yacht for $3.6 million.

The Crown argued though Ortmann and Van der Kolk were in charge of daily operations, Dotcom could not have ignored the illegal activities at the website and referred to emails where the German businessman sought weekly reports from his employees.

“Copyrightinfringing content could not have escaped his notice,” emphasized Gordon, according to local NZME agency.

On Monday, the Crown charged the accused of paying its most prolific users to attract more traffic to his website despite knowing their content infringed copyright.

The extradition trial has been postponed ten times since Dotcom and his associates were arrested in January 2012 from their rented mansion in the outskirts of Auckland, after which Megaupload was shut down, their accounts frozen and their property confiscated.

The operation was part of an extensive international operation led by the FBI.

Until now, of the seven members of Megaupload, its Estonian programmer Andrus Nomm is the only one to have been prosecuted.

He was sentenced to a little over a year in prison in the U.S. after he pleaded guilty to copyright infringement.