Do Kwon will probably not be extradited before the end of March, lawyers said

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon cannot be extradited to the United States in time for the company to face a lawsuit with the country's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), his lawyers said.

On February 26, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Kaplan Hecker and Fink David Patten Kwon said that Kwon will not be extradited from Montenegro, where he has been since March 2023, “before the end of March”. His lawyer said his team expected Kwon to be extradited to the US already, but “unforeseen errors” delayed the process.

“[Kwon] He may or may not be available at the start of the trial, which is scheduled to begin on March 25, 2024,” Patten said. “We only provided this information to the court to update the situation […] Regardless of the date of Mr. Kuhn's final extradition, we do not want the trial to be delayed.

According to Goran Rodić, who represents Kwon in Montenegro's legal process, the country's highest court ruled on February 21, 2007, to extradite the Terraform founder to the United States “based on false information.” According to the lawyer, the Montenegrin court's request to extradite the US to South Korea is based on allegations that the opposite is true.

“On February 21, 2024, we appealed the High Court's decision considering its illegality,” Rodić said. “The ‘summary' process took longer than we had anticipated because the lower court made several unexpected errors. At this point, I don't expect Mr. Kwon to be extradited – either to South Korea or the United States – before the end of March.

The lawyers' case suggests the United States will win its extradition battle with South Korea. Kwon was arrested in Montenegro in March 2023 for using forged travel documents and has been in the country for almost a year while extradition requests are processed. At the time of Terra's collapse and capture in May 2022, his whereabouts were unknown.

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The SEC filed charges against Kwon and Terraform in February 2023, and the United States Attorney's Office indicted Terra's co-founder on eight counts in March 2023. Kwon and Terraform allegedly orchestrated a “multi-billion dollar crypto asset securitization scam” related to the offering of TerraUSD (UST) and Terra (LUNA).

Judge Jed Rakoff, who is presiding over the civil case, granted summary judgment in December 2023 against Terraform's filing of unregistered securities with the SEC. The trial was previously delayed to accommodate Kwon but could begin on March 25. Former US President Donald Trump will appear in his first criminal trial on the same day in the same court district.

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