Terra’s indicted co-founder Daniel Shin is set to make a court appearance at the Seoul Southern District Court for his first trial on May 26, according to a local report.
Shin, a co-accused in the Terra project failure was recently indicted by South Korea on violations of capital-markets law among other charges.
He and nine other staff members of Terraform Labs face multiple charges, for illegal trading; two others are accused of breach of trust.
In the Bloomberg report on April 25, prosecutors froze assets worth roughly 246 billion won [$184 million] allegedly belonging to Shin and nine others.
The property freeze procedure including imposing foreclosure on flats and foreign vehicles owned by former executives and others, marked the first step towards retrieving the proceeds of crime, the report noted.
According to investigators, all the defendants were directly involved with the crypto project, having handled marketing, systems development, and management.
However, Shin’s lawyer, Kim Ki-dong, denied all the accusations in a statement.
Shin has nothing to do with the Terra, Luna collapse as he left the [company] two years before the fallout. He voluntarily returned to South Korea immediately after the collapse and has been faithfully cooperating with the probe for over 10 months, hoping to contribute to fact-finding.
Meanwhile, a Seoul Court gave the green signal to seize $176 million in assets owned by Do Kwon, a key figure in the Terra Luna debacle and Shin’s former business partner.
Terra’s Main Accused Assets Seized
The move followed after a local news agency claimed that the Terra co-founder had allegedly hidden $100 million in a Swiss bank account.
While on the run, Do-hyung Kwon, reportedly disputed US jurisdiction. This comes amidst South Korean and American law enforcement agencies competing to extradite the wanted crypto billionaire who was recently apprehended in Montenegro.
It is not yet known whether the Supreme Court actually granted the request for a postponement or whether the Terra founder actually appealed.
According to some analysts, the disgraced CEO may be buying time to lessen the severity of his sentence in the future.
On May 12, 2022, stablecoin UST and the crypto asset LUNA of the Terra Ecosystem crashed in a matter of days with investors losing millions of savings. Prosecutors alleged that the defendants took away profit worth 463 billion won [nearly $346 million] before the collapse.