KEY POINTS
- The case will now return to square one for retrial and decision
- The U.S. and South Korea both filed to get Kwon extradited just days after his arrest
- Kwon is faced with eight separate charges in the U.S., including wire fraud
Do Kwon, the co-founder of collapsed blockchain protocol and payments platform Terraform Labs, may not be extradited to the United States anytime soon as a Montenegro court overturned an earlier decision of a Podgorica court to allow for the ex-crypto mogul's U.S. extradition.
The Appellate Court of Montenegro said it has "accepted the appeal of the defendant Kwon Do Hyeong's (Do Kwon) defense attorneys, annulled the decision of the High Court in Podgorica Kv. No. 146/24 dated February 20, 2024, and returned the case to the first instance to the court for retrial and decision," as per a Google-translated statement released by the appeal court's website Tuesday.
The court noted that "there are no clear and valid reasons for decisive facts regarding the order of arrival of requests" for extradition lodged by the U.S. and South Korea, Kwon's home country.
While the decision does not mean Kwon won't be extradited to the U.S. or South Korea, it does delay his extradition, which Washington has been pushing for since the former tech entrepreneur was arrested in Montenegro in March last year for falsifying documents.
At the time of his arrest, Montenegro's interior minister Filip Adzic described Kwon as "a person suspected of being one of the most wanted fugitives."
Hours after his arrest, New York prosecutors charged Kwon with fraud in relation to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May 2022. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams revealed at the time that Kwon had been charged with eight separate charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud and engage in market manipulation.
Ahead of his arrest, South Korea had been working to track down the disgraced crypto mogul. Kwon and several other former Terraform Labs employees have been wanted by South Korean authorities for the role they played in the Terra collapse that wiped out over $5 billion in investor funds. Among its efforts was getting Kwon into Interpol's red notice list.
Days after his arrest, the Montenegrin government revealed that the U.S. and South Korea have sought Kwon's extradition. At the time, Montenegro's justice minister Marko Kovac told reporters that "the citizenship of the person and other circumstances will be taken into account when deciding" over the fallen crypto titan's extradition. He also indicated that Singapore may turn in an extradition request – Kwon reportedly fled to Singapore from South Korea before his crypto firm crashed.
