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There is nothing. The clubs are shit. Where do you go? Tell us where you go?’ And I’m like, ‘There is nothing.’ The reaction, he said, was astonishment. ‘What! Why are you still here?’

Dotcom says he told them: “That’s not what you do here. You go for walks, you go on the beach, you quad bike or whatever.” The reaction: “They’re like: ‘What the fuck? There is no fun here.’ ”

It mattered little to Dotcom — “I was really never a party animal”. He does not drink alcohol, and doesn’t touch drugs. “For me, it is no big deal. But all these friends I have that did well in their lives, they want to go out, they want to get drunk, they want to see some pretty girls, they want to spend and they want to impress with their spending and do all these things. In New Zealand you just don’t have the opportunity to do that. There is just nothing that caters to that group of people. There are not many, but when they go somewhere on a holiday, and they don’t find that, none of them will want to come back.”

The tycoon knows commentary on opportunities (or the lack of opportunities) for the super rich won’t be received well, but doesn’t mean them to be derogatory. “For the average New Zealander everything I am saying now sounds completely ridiculous and that would be like the perfect hate thing.” He knows his opportunity and wealth mean the Dotcoms were seen as “spoilt”.

THE NEW ZEALAND winter of 2011 approached and the Dotcoms were eager to chase summer. Europe beckoned, as did the opportunity to leave behind the frustration growing with the family’s new home and staff.

Dotcom was also eager to use the trip to stage the first of two spectacular stunts — scripting a narrative in which he starred, filmed on his favourite race track.

When they left New Zealand, Dotcom and family travelled with all the comforts of home. It meant that not only did they leave New Zealand, but so did the furniture they wanted to use on the holiday and the cars Dotcom wanted to race around the Nürburgring Nordschleife race track. For the holiday, they took 12 cars, golf buggies and jet skis, the furniture and 18 staff to manage the logistics.

“They were traveling with us, organising the containers . . . I was travelling with all my furniture, so when we rented the house in Spain I had my own bed. I had my own chairs and stuff . . . It was a massive logistic nightmare to get all this done. Some of the staff were fighting. Someone is bad mouthing someone else. You wouldn’t believe how many people come to me and then bad mouth their colleague. ‘I did this, he did

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