Peters questions Dotcom raid

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters insists the public has yet to be told everything about the Kim Dotcom case.

But he’s not about to launch an immediate inquiry into those questions now he is part of the Government.

The comments come ahead of a lengthy series of Court of Appeal hearings set to run over the next four weeks.

Dotcom and three others involved in the Megaupload file sharing website were arrested by New Zealand police in 2012.

The arrests were the key part of a worldwide FBI operation aimed at destroying Megaupload and bringing those who ran it to the United States to face charges of criminal copyright breaches, money laundering and running an organised criminal enterprise.

Since then, the Government’s lawyers have been trying to extradite Dotcom, and co-accused Matthias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato, to the US.

Peters has called for an inquiry to find the answers over the way the raid was run.

“I’m talking about the procedures by which he was raided. There were substantial breaches of the law that occurred. Nobody has taken responsibility for it.”

The case has been fraught from the outset with questions about police use of the elite anti-terrorist squad to carry out the raid and the discovery the highly secretive Government Security Communications Bureau had unlawfully spied on the targets.

Peters said the secret settlement between Dotcom and police, in which police paid a six-figure sum to the accused millionaire, should not stand in the way of getting answers.

“The quality of your observance of the law and fundamental rights can’t be bargained away with an out-of-court settlement.

“It goes to what sort of country you want to be. The fundamental way the agencies acted was wrong.”

If the extradition appeal fails in court, Justice Minister Andrew Little may be asked to sign it off.