The Supreme Court of Justice of Montenegro announced this Friday that will extradite Do Kwon, creator of the Luna and UST cryptocurrencies, and responsible for one of the biggest scandals in the history of the sector. Of course, it is still not known to which country.
The South Korean businessman is in the crosshairs of several nations that want to file criminal charges against him for his responsibility in the Terra ecosystem debacle, a disaster that is estimated to have swept between 40,000 and 60,000 million dollars of the crypto ecosystem.
South Korea and the United States are the countries that have taken the lead in demanding Do Kwon’s extradition. However, it is still unknown what the fate of the once young cryptocurrency wonder will be.
In an abbreviated procedure, The businessman agreed to be extradited to South Korea, his native country. Nevertheless, Reuters reports that the decision on his final fate has been delegated to the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice, considering that multiple nations are demanding Do Kwon’s handover to the authorities.
Montenegro will extradite Do Kwon once he completes his four-month jail sentence for using fake passports. It is not yet known what will happen to Han Chang-jooone of his partners and former chief financial officer of Terraform Labs. The aforementioned was arrested during the same procedure.
At the time of his arrest, Do Kwon had been on the run for several months. After the UST and Luna scandal, the South Korean had left Singapore, where he lived, without leaving a record of his departure from the city-state. In Montenegro, meanwhile, he had tried to take a plane to Dubai using a forged Costa Rican passport, but ended up cornered by the police. Forged Belgian documents had also been found among his belongings.
Extradition was one of the points of greatest debate after his arrest. Montenegro did not have such agreements with South Korea and Singapore. And although it did have an old treaty with the United States, the authorities were not sure if it applied in this particular case.
The final word on his fate will be the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice. If in principle his extradition to South Korea is finalized, which is what Do Kwon has accepted, it would not be unusual for the authorities of the Asian country to formally accuse him of his crimes and then deliver it to the United States.
The US has already filed civil and criminal charges against the former leader of Terra
Regardless of the decision of the Montenegrin justice, The United States will get its hands on Do Kwon sooner or later. The former leader of Terraform Labs faces both civil and criminal charges in North America and, seeing the recent cases of Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and Changpeng Zhao (Binance), the US authorities will not want to miss the opportunity to apply an exemplary punishment to him.
Last February, before his arrest, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused Do Kwon of fraud. The organization sued the businessman and his former company for violate the Securities Law and the Exchange Law.
“The Terra ecosystem was not decentralized, nor was it finance. It was simply a fraud backed by the so-called algorithmic stablecoin UST, whose price was controlled by the defendants, not by any code,” the SEC said at the time.
While in March, hours after his arrest in Montenegro, the United States District Court in Manhattan filed 8 criminal charges against him. They were for securities fraud, wire fraud, commodity fraud and conspiracy.