Despite the return of these items, most of Kim Dotcom’s wealth remains in the custody of New Zealand officials. At the time of the original raid, 64 bank accounts as well as various PayPal accounts were suspended by the FBI. These contained around $ 175 million in the names of Megaupload Ltd., Vestor Ltd., Finn Batato, Julius Bencko, Sven Echternach, Mathias Ortmann, Andrus Nomm, and Bram Van Der Kolk. Around 30 cars were also seized.
Kim’s defence centres around the 800 files per second uploaded to Megaupload and the impossibility of policing all that traffic. He will also rely on US privacy laws such as Electronic Communication Privacy Act, which prohibits the administrators from looking into the accounts of the users. Kim said: “If there was a bright side to my time in jail, it was weight loss, I dropped 16kg”.
