Do Kwon Has Been Arrested in Montenegro
- Do Kwon was reportedly arrested along with an associate at an airport in Montenegro on Thursday.
- He was said to have been found with falsified documents.
- Kwon claims the charges against him are politically motivated.
A person believed to be Terra Luna co-founder Do Kwon was arrested in Montenegro on March 23, according to a post by the country’s Minister of the Interior, Filip Adzic. Several news outlets, including the local Vijesti, have confirmed that a South Korean national was apprehended on the Balkan nation’s territory.
Adzic tweeted that
Montenegrin police have detained a person suspected of being one of the most wanted fugitives, South Korean citizen Do Kwon, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Terraform Labs.
Adzic tweeted that Kwon was arrested at the airport in Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica, with falsified documents. While Interpol was yet to react to the news, the South Korean local news platform Yonhap News Agency provided clarity on the situation.
The news agency reported that authorities established that the suspect in custody was the same person as the wanted Do Kwon based on “photo data,” along with the name, nationality, and age of an identification card.
Kwon was said to have been caught alongside his former assistant, Han Mo. However, the National Police Agency of South Korea has asked the Montenegrin authorities to provide “fingerprint information” to fully confirm his identity before further steps are announced.
According to reports, Montenegro does not have extradition treaties with either South Korea or Singapore. However, it does have a previous extradition pact with the US and has previously responded to requests to extradite US citizens. Additionally, the nation consults with Interpol on extradition-related issues.
Kwon has been the subject of numerous investigations and was even placed on Interpol’s red notice following the collapse of Terra and its supporting ecosystem, which wiped out $40 billion. Kwon’s passport was also revoked last year, and all attempts to capture the former Terra CEO proved futile.
Amidst claims he was on the run, Kwon tweeted in mid-September that “I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar— for any government agency that has shown interest in communicating, we are in full cooperation, and we don’t have anything to hide.”
Do Kwon, at the time, added that they were “in the process of defending ourselves in multiple jurisdictions – we have held ourselves to an extremely high bar of integrity and look forward to clarifying the truth over the next few months.”
Do Kwon also claimed that the accusations made against him by the South Korean prosecutors are baseless and driven by politics. However, other regulators have taken an interest in Kwon’s case. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Terraform Labs and Kwon of scamming American investors who bought its cryptocurrency assets, LUNA, and its volatile stablecoin Terra.
The SEC charged Kwon with “orchestrating a multi-billion dollar crypto asset securities fraud involving an algorithmic stablecoin and other crypto asset securities.” In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun investigating Kwon’s role in the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. But so far, Kwon has not been charged with any financial crime in the US.
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