Do Kwon, the fallen digital asset kingpin behind the $40 billion LUNA and TerraUSD implosion, has been sentenced to four months in prison on charges of document forgery.
Kwon was arrested in March at an airport in the country’s capital of Podgorica as he attempted to board a flight to Dubai with fake documents. His identity was confirmed by authorities in his native South Korea, and he has been in detention since. He was arrested alongside Han Chang-Joon, the former Chief Financial Officer of Terraform Labs, the company behind the collapsed Terra ecosystem.
In the first hearing last month, Kwon pleaded not guilty—a plea he maintained all the way to a hearing last week. As one Korean outlet reports, he told the court he received the Costa Rican passport from a traveling agency in Singapore. He also possessed a Belgian passport which he claimed to have received from another agency.
“I traveled all over the world with a Costa Rican passport,” he said in court.
The outlet further reports that Kwon tried to take the fall for his colleague, asking to shoulder all the blame for the document forgery.
The Montenegrin court sentenced both men to four months behind bars. However, they will complete the sentence in about a month as the time spent in detention will be considered. While the two were granted bail last week, the court moved to keep them in detention as it considered extradition requests from Korea and the U.S.
The court also ordered the confiscation of their documents, including the two Belgian and Costa Rican passports.
The two can appeal the sentencing in eight days.
Kwon is wanted by U.S. and Korean authorities for charges including commodities, securities, wire fraud, and violating the Capital Markets Act, respectively.
Montenegro doesn’t have any extradition agreements with either of the two countries. Legal experts, however, expect Korea’s extradition request to take precedence as it was filed first. Additionally, most of the crimes and operations were in Korea, another factor that’s considered in Montenegrin extradition hearings.
If extradited to Korea, he is expected to be handed the longest-ever sentence for a financial crime at over 40 years.
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