A court in Montenegro on Friday approved the extradition of cryptocurrency entrepreneur Do Kwon after his arrest in June.
The approval leaves him at the discretion of the minister who has to decide either to hand him over to South Korea or the United States.
Do Kwon and his ally were sentenced to four months in prison in June for using counterfeit passports. Do Kwon is accused of committing a multibillion-dollar fraud in the United States.
Following their arrest, the police reported that they had discovered forged passports from Costa Rica, an additional set from Belgium, laptop computers, and other electronics in their luggage.
The defendants refuted the accusations made by the Montenegrin prosecutor during a hearing in May. His firm, Terraform Labs, issued a statement in July stating that it would refute the “misguided and deeply flawed” accusations made by the United States.
Do Kwon has consented to be extradited to South Korea under a shortened process, according to the High Court in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, but the minister of justice will have the final say because several governments have asked for his handover.
Kwon, a South Korean, served as the previous CEO of Terraform Labs, a South Korean startup that created the stablecoin TerraUSD, which crashed in May 2022 and rocked the cryptocurrency markets.
