South Korean citizen, fugitive “cryptocurrency king” Do Kwon will be released from the prison in Spuž near Podgorica today, but he will not be able to leave Montenegro.
This continues the months-long “judicial-political saga” about which country should extradite that South Korean citizen, that is, which country submitted the request for extradition first, as well as who makes the decision – the minister of justice or the court.
Do Kwon will leave the prison in Spuz after completing the four-month prison sentence he was sentenced to for forging personal documents, the High Court announced.
Before serving his prison sentence, he spent eight months in extradition custody as he was arrested on international warrants issued by South Korea and the USA for financial fraud.
The High Court ordered that Do Kwon’s travel document not be returned upon his release from prison in order to prevent his possible departure from Montenegro, given that the Supreme Court postponed his extradition to South Korea.
The Supreme Court accepted the proposal of the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office (VDT) to postpone or stop the execution of the final court decision to extradite Do Kwon to South Korea.
With this extraordinary legal remedy, the VDT initiated an examination of the legality of the court’s actions when deciding on the extradition of Do Kwon, but also the modification of the final decision of the High Court, i.e. to extradite the cryptocurrency king to the United States of America instead of South Korea.
The Appellate Court of Montenegro confirmed the decision of the High Court on the basis of which the fugitive “cryptocurrency king” Do Kwon will be extradited to South Korea. This decision is final, but VDT filed an extraordinary legal remedy.
The High Court has issued four different verdicts four times – in the first two that the decision is made by the Minister of Justice, in the third that he should be extradited to the USA and now that he should be extradited to South Korea. Do Kwon was arrested at the end of March 2023 at the airport in Podgorica on a South Korean warrant. On June 16, he was convicted for having a forged passport with which he intended to travel to Dubai on a private flight from Podgorica. Because of that part, the South Korean “crypto currency king” served a four-month sentence in a prison near Podgorica. His associate Hon Chang Jon, who was arrested together with him in Podgorica on February 5 of this year and extradited to South Korea, was also convicted of falsifying documents.
Do Kwon was at the center of the affair before the parliamentary elections in Montenegro last year when the then Prime Minister Dritan Abazović claimed that the current Prime Minister and leader of the “Europe Now” Movement, Milojko Spajić, was connected to him, which he denied. The Special Prosecutor’s Office announced that it had opened a case, but since then it has not commented on the case, Beta news agency writes.
