KEY POINTS
- The appeals court reiterated that South Korea's extradition request came earlier than that of the US
- Kwon is faced with fraud-related charges in both countries following the crash of Terra and Luna
- Terraform Labs has its own legal problems as the SEC recently questioned its 'suspicious' legal fees
Fallen cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon will be extradited to South Korea whether he likes it or not, the Appellate Court of Montenegro confirmed Wednesday, despite the attempt of the Terraform Labs founder's legal counsel to block the extradition request.
"Deciding on the appeal of the defendant's counsel, the panel of the Court of Appeals assessed that the first-instance court had correctly established that the request of the Republic of South Korea arrived earlier in the order of arrival compared to the request of the USA, so it correctly assessed this," the appeals court said Wednesday in a press release, referring to the High Court in Podgorica's earlier decision to have the former crypto businessman extradited to his home country.
The Wednesday announcement confirms that Kwon's legal counsel did try to block his extradition to South Korea, following reports that his attorneys were expected to appeal the High Court's decision. No timeline has been provided as to when he will be extradited.
Both Washington and Seoul filed to get Kwon extradited for multiple fraud-related charges. Only hours after he was arrested in Montenegro for faking travel documents, U.S. prosecutors charged him with fraud in connection to the crash of Terraform's TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin and the associated Luna reserve asset cryptocurrency.
He is accused of being involved in trading schemes designed to manipulate the UST's market price. If he were to be extradited to the United States, he would be facing the same office that is handling a criminal case against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
South Korea, on the other hand, has also been hard at work in getting Kwon back to his home country. Prosecutors in the Asian nation first froze the assets of several executives of Terraform Labs, the bankrupt crypto company that Kwon founded. They later moved to prevent the former crypto darling from accessing his supposed digital assets believed to be held by Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume.
A Binance spokesperson confirmed last year that it had provided South Korean authorities with the requested "assistance" regarding Kwon's crypto assets.
Meanwhile, Kwon's collapsed crypto empire is faced with its own legal battles, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently questioned the bankrupt blockchain protocol's "suspicious" multi-million-dollar legal payments to law firm Dentons.
The regulator said legal fees of $166 million that were paid to the law firm since 2023 were "siphoned" into an "opaque slush fund for its lawyers." The SEC wants the bankruptcy court to prohibit any of the millions Terraform seeks for its legal bills, including some $122 million in "staggering" retainer payments.
