Seoul searching: South Korea seeks Interpol help after declaring Do Kwon is on the run
Prosecutors in Seoul have turned to Interpol in the hunt for Do Kwon, co-founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency platform Terraform Labs.
South Korean authorities have requested the international crime-fighting organisation issue a red notice against Kwon Do-hyung, after losing patience with the 31-year-old’s lack of co-operation over an investigation into the catastrophic failure of TerraUSD and Luna tokens.
Seoul’s Southern District Prosecutors’ Office this morning declared Kwon was “obviously on the run and has no intention to appear before us for questioning”.
“We have begun the procedure to place him on the Interpol red notice list and revoke his passport,” a statement said.
Lyon-based Interpol issues red notices for the global pursuit of wanted fugitives.
The move comes after Kwon’s lawyer apparently told South Korean investigators he did not wish to respond immediately to the arrest warrant issued a week ago.
The documents listed a series of allegations pertaining to violations of South Korea’s capital markets law. Prosecutors said the warrants were all addressed to six individuals in Singapore.
It was understood Kwon had been in Singapore since April, but officials in the sovereign state confirmed over the weekend they believed he was no longer residing there.
“We are doing our best to locate and arrest him,” said South Korea’s prosecutors earlier today.
“He is clearly on the run as his company’s key finance people also left for the same country during that time.”
Kwon himself briefly peeped over the parapet in a rambling Twitter post on Saturday.
“[sic] Dear CT – I will tell you what i am doing and where i am if: 1) we are friends 2) we have plans to meet 3) we are involved in a gps based web3 game Otherwise you have no business knowing my gps coordinates,” he began.
“Really don’t understand why otherwise would be true – think about whether you would be comfortable with the same level of invasion of privacy for yourself.
“I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar — for any government agency that has shown interest to communicate, we are in full co-operation and we don’t have anything to hide.
“We are in the process of defending ourselves in multiple jurisdictions — we have held ourselves to an extremely high bar of integrity, and look forward to clarifying the truth over the next few months.”
He then quoted his own ‘on the run’ tweet, adding “Tbh havent gone running in a while, need to cut some calories”.
Leading up to the collapse, Kwon had spent months mocking global financial experts who warned that Terra’s business model was fatally flawed.
When critics – including UK economist Frances Coppola – lambasted Terra’s ‘algorithmic stablecoin’, Kwon responded publicly by labelling them ‘cockroaches’.
In other unseemly spats he said he drew entertainment from watching companies collapse, before answering a question on where yield reserves from the ‘Anchor Protocol’ were coming from with a bizarre “Your mom, obviously”.
Prior to their collapse, both Terra USD and Luna had a combined value of more than $60 billion. In May, they became almost worthless and, in the eyes of many analysts, lit the fuse on a wider cryptocurrency crash which has still not recovered.
Kwon also became a father for the first time this year, naming his daughter ‘Luna’ – his ‘dearest creation named after my greatest creation’.
He was recently asked if the name had now burdened his daughter with a lifetime of association to a massive financial failure.
“Let’s just say I have an incentive to make sure that her name isn’t something she should be ashamed of, but something that she can be proud of,” he replied.
“We’re not going to change her name or anything like that.”