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Megaupload founder appears in New Zealand court seeking bail

The founder of the shuttered file-sharing site Megaupload appeared in a New Zealand court Monday, as the U.S. Department of Justice seeks to extradite him and other company officials on criminal charges.

(CNN) Auckland - The U.S. authorities shut down Megaupload last week and announced indictments against seven people connected to the site, accusing them of operating an "international organized criminal enterprise responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of copyrighted works."

Four of those charged were arrested in New Zealand at the request of the U.S. government. They included Kim Dotcom, the site's founder, who is also known as Kim Schmitz. The New Zealand police detained Dotcom, a German citizen, on Friday after a dramatic raid on his luxury mansion in the affluent North Shore area of Auckland, the country's largest city.

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Economy

How SVB Is Different Than Lehman — And Not Different Enough

The fall of Silicon Valley Bank revives memories of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy. The two situations have some fundamental differences, but there is enough in common that the risks that SVB could spark a new global financial crisis is very real.

Photo of a person in front of a Silicon Valley Bank

A Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) branch office in Pasadena, California

Jean-Marc Vittori

-Analysis-

PARIS — In finance, brands can be the omens of disaster. On Monday, April 2, 2007, New Century Financial collapsed. The fall of this "financial institution of the new century," which had failed to properly assess risks, was the true starting point of the great financial crisis that culminated 18 months later with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

On Friday, March 10, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was shut down by U.S. authorities following the largest bank run in history. Its clients wanted to withdraw $42 billion in a single day.

The closure of the Silicon Valley bank was a result of disastrous management, but also from its central role in a start-up ecosystem that's been weakened by a scarcity of money.

The key question is: Is this closure the starting point of a new crisis?

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