The Montenegrin government in the Balkan Peninsula of Eastern Europe has decided to extradite Kwon Do-hyung (33), CEO of Terraform Labs, a key figure in the collapse of cryptocurrency Terra and Luna, to the United States, Montenegro daily Bjesti reported on the 27th (local time).
Vijesti said that the Montenegrin Ministry of Justice “accepted the United States’ extradition request after evaluating various criteria, including the seriousness of the crime, the order of the request, and the nationality of the requester,” and that Justice Minister Bojan Bozovic signed the extradition order for Kwon Do-hyung.
Previously, Mr. Kwon had been avoiding the law after the Terra and Luna crash in 2022, and was arrested in Montenegro in March last year, and Korea and the United States were competing to request extradition for him. Mr. Kwon has requested to be extradited to Korea, where sentences for economic crimes are relatively lenient. However, on the 24th, the Constitutional Court of Montenegro dismissed Kwon’s constitutional petition regarding the authority to make extradition decisions with a unanimous opinion of all judges, and on this day, the Ministry of Justice finally decided that the country of Kwon’s extradition would be the United States.
Mr. Kwon was indicted in Korea on charges of violating the Act on the Aggravated Punishment of Specific Economic Crimes (fraud, breach of trust), and is also on trial in the United States on eight charges, including product fraud, market manipulation, and securities fraud. The damage caused by the collapse of Terra and Luna is estimated to be at least $40 billion (approximately 56 trillion won) worldwide.
If Mr. Kwon is investigated and tried in the United States, the expected sentence is expected to be more than 100 years in prison, so it is predicted that he could actually receive life imprisonment. This is because Korea adopts the ‘aggravation principle’, which punishes a person by increasing the sentence of the most serious crime by 1.5 times even if he or she commits multiple crimes, but the United States follows the ‘multiple punishment principle’, which adds up the sentences for each crime without an upper limit.
Reporter Hong Jeong-su [email protected]
-
- great
- 0dog
-
- I’m sad
- 0dog
-
- I’m angry
- 0dog