Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon’s request to stay out of jail until his trial for allegedly using a forged passport was denied on Wednesday by a court in Montenegro.
A lower court had previously granted the creator of algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD and his former chief financial officer, Han Chang-joon, a bail of 400,000 euros, or about $435,000, to stay under house arrest with police supervision until the trial.
That decision was overturned after the prosecution appealed. The court that originally made the bail decision will now have to make another ruling, but there is no limit to the number of motions that can go between the lower and higher courts on the bail issue, according to Bloomberg. Kwon, at least for now, remains in jail.
Kwon pleaded not guilty after being arrested for allegedly trying to use a fake Costa Rican passport to fly from Montenegro to Dubai. Kwon and Chang-joon were also holding what authorities described as forged Belgian passports along with their South Korean travel documents. Kwon had been evading authorities in several countries since South Korea put out a warrant for his arrest in September.
Prosecutors in both South Korea and the U.S. are looking to extradite him, but that would have to come after his trial in Montenegro. If he’s tried in South Korea, he could face 40 years in prison—the longest sentence ever handed down in the country for financial crimes, the lead prosecutor on his case told the Wall Street Journal.
Federal prosecutors in New York have charged Kwon with conspiracy to defraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to engage in market manipulation.
