Montenegro Extradites Crypto Entrepreneur Do Kwon To U.S.
Montenegro on Tuesday extradited to the United States the South Korean cryptocurrency specialist Do Kwon, who is also wanted by Seoul over his firm’s multi-billion-dollar bankruptcy, the country’s interior ministry said.
Do Kwon was “handed over to the competent law enforcement authorities of the United States of America and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)”, Montenegro’s interior ministry said in a statement.
He was extradited upon the decision of Montenegro justice ministry to face “criminal proceedings in the US for crimes of conspiracy to commit fraud”, the statement added.
For months, Seoul and Washington have been seeking the South Korean’s extradition for his suspected role in a fraud linked to his company’s failure, which wiped out about $40 billion of investors’ money and shook global crypto markets.
Last week Justice Minister Bojan Bozovic issued a decision approving the extradition after a year and a half of court rulings and subsequent reversals over it.
Kwon’s Montenegrin lawyers denounced the decision as contrary to European conventions on extradition, and said they will appeal to the country’s constitutional court and to the European Court of Human Rights.
The crypto tycoon was arrested in March 2023 at the airport in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, while preparing to board a flight to Dubai, in possession of a fake Costa Rican passport.
Before his arrest, he had been on the run for months, fleeing South Korea and later Singapore, before his company went bankrupt in 2022.
Cryptocurrencies have come under increasing scrutiny from regulators after a string of controversies in recent years, including the high-profile collapse of the exchange.
