A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
As much as I find news of a breakfast between two people in a large and popular restaurant interesting, its wide coverage seems to be at the cost of another very important story.
I read on the Newshub website last week that the Human Rights Review Tribunal made a very
significant ruling about govt departmental failings and that the Attorney General, then Chris Finlayson, unlawfully withheld information from Kim Dotcom in response to his Privacy Act requests. The HRRT also ruled that the departments should not have sent the requests to the AG. Dotcom was awarded damages of $90,000 as a result of the AG declining to provide him the information.
This story is significant because the Attorney General is the person who should be enforcing and upholding the law for all New Zealanders. Yet our former AG instead broke the law. When Dotcom requested govt departments to provide whatever personal information they had about him under urgency, all the requests were sent to Mr Finlayson. He then declined the requests as vexatious and trivial, and notified that there were insufficient reasons for urgency.
Dotcom was accused of copyright breaches in the USA related to his cloud storage business, and his home in New Zealand was raided at the behest of the FBI. Yet he did not commit a crime in NZ and has never lived in the USA. However, he was thrown in jail and his assets were taken from him, with hard drives sent to the USA so they could prepare an extradition case for copyright fraud. This, by the way, wasn’t an extraditable offence so it was changed to racketeering instead.
The govt took away his financial means to be able to defend himself and he had to go to court to have funds released. He has been to court several times.
