On Monday, a Montenegro court sentenced the disgraced Terra (LUNA) founder Do Kwon to four months in prison for attempting to travel with a forged passport.
Kwon was first arrested in late March after trying to board a flight to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a Costa Rican passport, which authorities claimed was forged.
The Terra founder has spent nearly three months behind bars, time that will count towards his four-month sentence, according to an announcement from a court in Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital city.
Kwon attempted to argue in court that he had acquired the Costa Rican passport through a legitimate agency and traveled all over the world with it, according to the Korean news outlet Segye Ilbo.
Says the Terra founder,
“I filled out all the documents and received a Costa Rican passport through an agency in Singapore recommended by a friend. I got my Belgian passport through another agency…
When I applied for a Granada passport through the agency, it was rejected, but when I applied for a Costa Rica passport, there was no reason to doubt because the application was accepted.”
The judge quizzed Kwon about the name of the agency, though the Terra founder reportedly replied that he couldn’t recall it.
“It’s in Chinese, but I can’t remember exactly.”
The relatively short prison sentence in Montenegro isn’t likely to be the end of Kwon’s legal concerns.
Authorities in the United States and South Korea both want to extradite the disgraced crypto executive, who’s facing multiple charges arising from the $40 billion crash of the Terra ecosystem and its stablecoin TerraUSD (UST).
Kwon claimed on Twitter in February that he’d “stolen no money and never had ‘secret cashouts.’” He also said he was “happy to address any specific allegations” – though it remains unclear if he’s ever addressed the allegations in any public forum.
Dan Sunghan, the director of the financial crime investigation bureau at the Seoul Southern District Prosecution Service, tells Bloomberg that Kwon could serve more than four decades behind bars.
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