Han Chang-Joon, the former CFO of the now-defunct crypto firm Terraform Labs, has been extradited from Montenegro to South Korea. This follows the completion of his four-month prison sentence in Montenegro for attempting to travel with forged documents.
Chang-Joon, alongside Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, was arrested at a Montenegro airport in March last year. Do Kwon, who remains in custody in Montenegro, is currently awaiting a decision from the Ministry of Justice on whether he will be extradited to South Korea or the United States. His legal defense team recently requested a U.S. court to delay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) trial against him to allow for his personal appearance.
The legal proceedings against Kwon have been ongoing since last year. In December, an appeals court in Montenegro overturned an earlier decision to extradite Kwon to South Korea and the U.S. The SEC charged Terraform Labs and Kwon in February over the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna in May 2022, which led to the loss of $40 billion in investor wealth. South Korean prosecutors have levied similar charges against Kwon and Terra affiliates.
Following his arrest, Kwon faces multiple fraud counts from American federal prosecutors, in addition to civil charges in the U.S. and an ongoing investigation in South Korea related to the TerraUSD collapse. The Montenegro High Court upheld Kwon’s and Chang-Joon’s four-month sentence for document falsification, rejecting their appeal.
In a related case, Daniel Shin, the co-founder of Terraform Labs, was indicted in South Korea for capital markets law violations, with $185 million in assets frozen. Shin has denied any involvement in the company’s collapse, stating he left two years before the incident.
Many enforcement authorities and financial regulators, as well as the Interpol, were already on the hunt for Kwon for his alleged involvement in the collapse of terraUSD (UST) stablecoin and the Terra ecosystem.
