Terra CEO Do Kwon makes the news again after getting arrested in Montenegro. According to Filip Adzic, Montenegro’s Minister of Interior, Do Kwon was arrested at an international airport in the Balkan nation today.
On Thursday morning, Filip Adzic tweeted in Bosnian that Kwon was arrested at the airport in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, with falsified documents. Adzic added that they were waiting for official confirmation of Kwon’s identity.
“The former “cryptocurrency king”, who is behind losses of more than 40 billion dollars, was detained at the Podgorica airport with falsified documents, and the same is claimed by South Korea, the USA, and Singapore,” he said in the tweet. “We are waiting for official confirmation of identity.”
“The interior ministry of Montenegro did not immediately respond to an email seeking confirmation. Its phone number was unreachable. Interpol’s website did not have any update about Kwon’s arrest. Interpol did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. It appears, though, that the person arrested was indeed Kwon,” TechCrunch reported.
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The South Korean local news outlet Yonhap quoted a National Police Agency official as saying: “We checked the age, nationality, and name with the identification card the person had and confirmed that he was the same person as CEO Kwon with photo data.”
Why Terra’s Do Kwon was wanted
In the past 11 months, following Terra’s awful meltdown that saw the cryptocurrency market lose $40 billion, Kwon has been the subject of several arrest warrants.
On September 14, 2022, Cointelegraph reported that a court in Seoul, South Korea, had issued a warrant of arrest for Kwon and five other people at the time located in Singapore. In the prosecutor’s statement, the founder of Terra is accused of violating the country’s capital markets law.
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Sequel to the controversies surrounding his location and his evasion of government agencies, Kwon tweeted, “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.”
“We are 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,” he said.
Kwon’s claim was taken with a pinch of salt by prosecutors, who strongly believed he was on the run. During that time, he remained off the radar, and Interpol released a red notice asking law enforcement across the globe to search and get him arrested if found. In the same vein, after the red notice got out, the South Korean government instructed Kwon to surrender his passport or have it revoked.
Commenting on the charges levelled against him by the South Korean prosecutors, Kwon said they were politically instigated and illegal, with no relevant legal foundation or credibility.
“Every sovereign nation can interpret the red notice the way it sees fit,” he told journalist Laura Shin on her podcast Unchained in mid-October. At the time, he said he planned to address, appeal, and do everything to get to a “better result.”
This year, prosecutors from South Korea have travelled to Serbia on the account of an informant who alleged that Do Kwon resides there. Later in February, Terraform Labs and Kwon got charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for defrauding U.S. investors who acquired its crypto assets, LUNA, and the stablecoin, Terra.
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