Montenegro to Extradite Do Kwon to South Korea, Rejecting U.S. Request

Terraform Labs co-founder and fraudster Do Kwon is once again set to be extradited from Montenegro to his native South Korea, after a ruling from the Balkan nation’s court of appeals Thursday.

The Appellate Court of Montenegro issued a ruling confirming an earlier decision from a lower court, the High Court of Podgorica, to send Kwon to South Korea instead of the U.S., which is also seeking his extradition.

Both countries want to try Kwon for criminal charges tied to the $40 billion implosion of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem in May 2022. Terra was the first proverbial domino to fall in a sequence of high-profile crypto company collapses that year including FTX, the second-biggest crypto exchange in the world.

Kwon went on the lam shortly after Terra’s collapse. In September 2022, Interpol put out a red notice for Kwon. Six months later, in March 2023, he was arrested and subsequently jailed in Montenegro for attempting to use a fake Costa Rican passport to fly to Dubai. Kwon was initially given a four-month sentence for using falsified documents, but remained in prison until March of this yeart, when he was released on bail without his real passport, which was confiscated to prevent him from leaving the country.

Thursday’s decision is expected to put an end to months of back-and-forth over whether Kwon should be extradited to South Korea, which submitted its extradition request first, or the U.S. Kwon successfully fought against earlier rulings to extradite him to the U.S. but, when the High Court of Podgorica ruled to send him to South Korea, the country’s Supreme Court stepped in to postpone it after the country’s top prosecutor issued a statement arguing that the court’s decision overstepped the limits of its power. There have been numerous court rulings overturning previous decisions to send him to one or another of the two countries.

A truly final decision on where Kwon will be extradited can only be made by Montenegro’s minister of justice, according to the Office of the Supreme State Prosecutor. Montenegro’s Prime Minister, Milojko Spajic, is a personal investor in Terraform Labs, Bloomberg reported earlier this year.

No date for Kwon’s extradition has yet been set.