South Korean police have asked the Serbian government for assistance in bringing Kwon back to face prosecution in South Korea.
The international quest for Terraform Labs’ controversial creator and CEO Do Kwon continues, with South Korean officials reportedly assuming he is in Serbia after departing Singapore in September.
According to a Dec. 11 report from Chosun Media, South Korean police followed a tip-off regarding Do Kwon’s movements and were able to confirm his presence in Serbia.
“We just received information that CEO Kwon was in Serbia, which was confirmed,” an official told the newspaper.
As part of the probe, South Korea’s Ministry of Finance “is in the process of asking assistance from the Serbian government,” according to the newspaper.
South Korean investigators have been looking for Do Kwon since Terra’s demise, but haven’t had much success tracking him down until recently.
The 31-year-old was believed to have relocated to Singapore around the end of April, right before the Terra ecosystem’s catastrophic collapse.
On September 14, the Financial and Securities Criminal Unit of the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office issued an arrest warrant for Kwon for allegedly breaking South Korean capital markets legislation.
Around that time, Singapore officials verified that Kwon was no longer in the country, and that he had traveled to Dubai in route to an unknown destination.
Soon after, on September 26, Interpol allegedly issued a “Red Notice” on Kwon. However, as of December 11, Do Kwon did not seem to have been added to Interpol’s Red Notice database on the website.
Kwon was ordered to forfeit his passport by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on October 6. Failure to comply would result in the revocation of his passport entirely, according to the ministry.
Later that month, South Korean authorities verified rumors that Do Kwon had traveled to Dubai for a probable layover before continuing on to another destination, which turned out to be Serbia.
If Do Kwon is identified in Serbia, it remains to be unclear what legal threads South Korea can be pulled to extradite the Terraform Labs founder.
While South Korea has bilateral extradition treaties with 31 nations, Serbia is not one of them. South Korea, on the other hand, has engaged into a considerably larger multilateral extradition deal with the Council of Europe, to which Serbia has signed.
