Do Kwon prosecutor warns of flight risk as crypto fugitive granted €400,000 bail and house arrest

Do Kwon will be out of jail on bail as soon as he pays €400,000, a court in Montenegro ruled today.

The ruling comes even as the court was warned that he and his business partner Han Chang-joon are flight risks, after the pair were caught last month attempting to board a plane in Montenegro headed to Dubai.

“I will not hide, I agree to security measures, I will show up when requested,” Bloomberg reported Kwon as saying in court.

Both Kwon and Han Chang-joon will be subject to house arrest — their lawyer has proposed that they stay in an apartment belonging to the lawyer’s girlfriend — and also to regular check ins with the court, local press reported.

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Prosecutor Haris Šabotić objected to the application for bail arguing that Kwon and Han had “zero interest” in staying in Montenegro and that the amount was not enough to dissuade them from leaving the country.

The Terraform Labs co-founder and his former chief financial officer faced a judge yesterday as they stand accused of faking documents to get out of the country following a six-month manhunt. They have both denied the charges.

The pair will likely each pay the €400,000 bail amount — they both submitted that the money for bail would be posted by their wives.

During the hearing the pair were questioned by a judge about their finances, which Kwon described as “average.”

When asked about his personal finances by Judge Ivana Becić, TV reporter Miljana Dašić of local broadcaster Vijesti quoted Kwon as saying:

“Apart from an apartment in Seoul worth $3 million, I don’t own any other property. Most of the money I have is of fluctuating value, that is, in the form of ownership shares in companies that are not listed on the stock market and whose value is not available to the public,” Kwon said to the judge.

He added that he did not want to go into further details given the media presence in court.

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According to a filing from the Securities Exchange Commission, Kwon and Terra transferred 100,000 Bitcoin from Terra and Luna Foundation Guard accounts to a cold wallet.

Since May 2022, Terra and Kwon have transferred Bitcoin from the wallet to an unnamed Swiss bank, revealed by South Korean authorities as Sygnum. They converted the Bitcoin to cash.

Between June 2022 and Feb 2023, more than $100 million in fiat has been withdrawn from the Swiss bank.

This week South Korean court approved a request from authorities to freeze $176 million worth of Kwon’s domestic assets. These include his Seoul residence, cars, and cryptocurrencies in various exchanges, a spokesperson for the Seoul prosecutors’ office confirmed to news site Forkast.