A South Korean court has dismissed an arrest warrant issued against Yoo Mo, a key member of the Terraform Labs team and aide to the company founder Do Kwon.
Korean authorities arrested Mo last week for allegedly violating the Capital Markets Act as part of the Terra team. His arrest warrant was issued alongside five others—including founders Kwon and Daniel Shin—in September, and the authorities have been after him since.
Mo’s arrest warrant specifically singled him out for deploying a bot program during his stint at Terraform Labs (TFL), which artificially inflated the price of UST, the company’s algorithmic stablecoin that crashed in May and sparked a wider market collapse in the Terra ecosystem and beyond.
According to local reports, the arrest wasn’t necessary. The Seoul Southern District Court in South Korea dismissed the warrant, with Judge Hong Jin-pyo ruling that his detainment wasn’t pivotal to the prosecutors’ case against him and Terra.
Mo, who was the Head of General Business Operations at Terraform Labs, was the first key person to be arrested following the May crash that sparked the collapse of Celsius Network, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Voyager Digital, and several other digital currency firms.
Meanwhile, Do Kwon is still at large as Korean authorities intensify their pursuit. Kwon was originally believed to reside in Singapore, but the city-state’s police denied the reports. His whereabouts are still unknown, even after taking to Twitter to claim that he’s not on the run and claiming to be planning to defend his company in court.
Korea’s latest move in its pursuit of Kwon was invalidating his passport, rendering him unable to travel around the world and potentially forcing him back home. The government gave him 14 days, starting September 15, to return the passport.
While it goes after the Terra boss, Korea’s government is also reassessing its approach towards the industry as a whole, with several key stakeholders blaming the regulatory ambiguity for the Terra crash. The latest to criticize the government is Lee Sir-Goo, the CEO of Dunamu, a fintech giant which runs Korea’s biggest exchange Upbit.
In response, lawmakers are weighing a new approach to Bitcoin oversight. In a Thursday parliamentary session, lawmaker Yoon Sang-Hyun proposed the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the LUNA/UST crash.
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