Freeze on funds hurting Dotcom’s defense, say lawyers

Kim Dotcom’s attorneys alleged Thursday, a freeze on the German tech entrepreneur’s funds was preventing them from putting up a strong defense for him that includes six experts as witnesses.

Dotcom, founder of the nowclosed internet portal Megaupload, along with three of his former associates, is undergoing trial for extradition to the U.S. where he is accused of 13 charges related to internet piracy, organized crime and money laundering.

Judge Nevin Dawson is analyzing a petition for the postponement or suspension of the trial made by the defendants who allege the U.S. is not allowing them to access their accounts to cover the costs of American experts and witnesses.

During Thursday’s hearing, Dotcom’s U.S. attorney Ira Rothken argued, the budget needed to employ experts would go up to $500,000, according to Radio New Zealand.

Rothken was called to give evidence in the hearing to explain what type of foreign experts were needed for Dotcom’s defense.

The attorney said the defense needed experts who were specialized in U.S. laws, analysis of metadata and file sharing, adding, the collection of all the necessary information to prepare the case would take around six months.

New Zealand prosecutors, who are representing the U.S. too, said Megaupload ignored 10,000 notices of copyright violation, to which Rothken replied they had forgotten to mention the 10 million others that had been complied with.

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 U.S. says Megaupload, which had 50 million users and represented four percent of global Internet traffic, caused losses of more than $500 million to the film and music industry through internet piracy and generated illegal profits to the tune of $175 million.

Until now, of the seven members of Megaupload, its 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.