Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs, has reportedly been arrested in Montenegro, according to a local government official.
On Thursday morning, Montenegro’s interior minister, Filip Adzic, tweeted in Bosnian that Kwon had been arrested at the airport in Podgorica, the country’s capital, with falsified documents.
The Korean news agency, 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.”
Kwon has been under investigation for the past 11 months, following the Terra/LUNA collapse, which resulted in the loss of approximately $40 billion from the cryptocurrency market.
“I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar – for any government agency that has shown interest to communicate, we are in full cooperation and we don’t have anything to hide.” Kwon tweeted in mid-September
“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 at the time.
Prosecutors have refuted Kwon’s claims that he was not hiding from authorities, despite his denial.
His whereabouts were unknown as of late September, and Interpol issued a red notice requesting that law enforcement agencies worldwide search for and arrest him.
Kwon was ordered by the South Korean government to surrender his passport or risk having it revoked.
Do Kwon has stated that the charges brought against him by South Korean prosecutors are unjustified and politically motivated.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Terraform Labs and Kwon in mid-February with defrauding US investors who bought its crypto assets, LUNA, and the not-so-stable stablecoin, Terra.