Montenegro on Tuesday extradited to the United States South Korean cryptocurrency expert Do Kwon, who is also wanted by Seoul in connection with the billion-dollar bankruptcy of his company, officials said.
Do Quon was “handed over to the competent law enforcement authorities of the United States and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the Ministry of the Interior of Montenegro said in a statement.
The statement said he was extradited following a decision by the Montenegrin Justice Ministry to face “criminal proceedings in the United States for crimes of fraud conspiracy.”
For several months, Seoul and Washington have been demanding the South Korean’s extradition for his suspected role in a fraud linked to his company’s failure that wiped out nearly $40 billion of investors’ money and shook global crypto markets.
Last week Justice Minister Bojan Bozovic issued a decision approving the extradition after a year and a half of court decisions and subsequent reversals.
Kvon’s Montenegrin lawyers condemned the decision as contrary to European conventions on extradition, and said they would appeal to the country’s constitutional court and the European Court of Human Rights.
“Today Montenegro completed the extradition of Do Kwon to the United States to face charges in the Terra/Luna case”, Prime Minister Miloško Spajić said on X.
“This extradition reflects our unwavering commitment to international justice and the rule of law!”
The decline of ‘talent’
The crypto tycoon was arrested in March 2023 at the airport of Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, while preparing to fly to Dubai with a fake Costa Rican passport.
Before his arrest in the small Balkan country, he remained on the run for months, fleeing to South Korea and later Singapore, before his company went bankrupt in 2022.
Montenegro had already deported Kwon’s business partner – identified only by his initials JCH – to South Korea in early February.
Terraform Labs created a cryptocurrency called TerraUSD, which was marketed as a “stablecoin”, a token that is pegged to a stable asset such as the US dollar to prevent huge fluctuations.
Do Kwon successfully marketed them as the next big thing in crypto, attracting billions in investments and global publicity.
South Korean media reports have described him as a “genius”.
But despite billions of investments, TerraUSD and its sister token Luna went into a death spiral in May 2022.
Experts said Kwon had set up a grand pyramid scheme in which many investors lost their life savings.
He left South Korea before the accident and remained on the run for months.
In January, Terraform Labs officially sought bankruptcy protection in the United States.
The bankruptcy filing will allow Terraform “to execute on its business plan while navigating ongoing legal proceedings, including pending representative litigation in litigation involving Singapore and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission,” the company said in a statement.
It said it also intended to “meet all financial obligations to employees and vendors.”
Cryptocurrencies have come under scrutiny from regulators in recent years following a number of controversies, including high-profile collapses of exchanges.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
