Terra co-founder’s arrest quashed due to minimal flight risk

Shin Hyun-Seong, also known as Daniel Shin, is a co-founder of Terraform Labs. A prosecutor asked a municipal court in South Korea to issue an arrest warrant for Shin Hyun-Seong, but the court denied their request.

With the recent arrest of Terra’s other co-founder, Do Kwon, South Korean officials attempted to exert control over Shin, which was their second attempt to do so.

Kwon was detained on March 23 at the airport in Podgorica, Montenegro, for attempting to leave the country using fake travel documents.

This effort led to Kwon’s arrest. The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office took advantage of this circumstance and on March 27 issued a warrant for Shin’s arrest, claiming that he participated in illegally monetizing Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) transactions.

The warrant stated that Shin’s participation in these transactions was illegally monetizing Terra.

According to Yonhap, the application was denied by the Seoul Southern District Court because the allegations against Shin were not established and it was unlikely that Shin would pose a flight risk or destroy evidence.

Shin is now being investigated for many counts of fraud, the most prominent of which is that he reportedly tried to hide the risks associated with investing in Terraform Labs’ native tokens.

Once Kwon was arrested in Montenegro, officials from both the United States of America and South Korea made attempts to extradite the businessman.

According to what has been published, Montenegro’s Minister of Justice Marko Kova indicated that the United States made diplomatic efforts to ask for Kwon’s extradition, but that it was the South Korean authorities that requested extradition.

Kova, speaking through an interpreter, made the following statement: “If we receive multiple extradition requests, I would like to state that the state to which they will be extradited is determined by several factors, including the gravity of the crime, the location and time of the crime, the order in which we received the extradition request, and several other factors.”