Almost a week following Terraform Labs’ settlement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), fresh revelations from an April court document have sparked a new controversy surrounding the defunct crypto project.
According to a report from Montenegrin media outlet Vijesti, Prime Minister Milojko Spajic, who assumed office in October 2023, invested $75,000 in Singapore-based Terraform Labs in April 2018 to acquire 750,000 Terra (LUNA) tokens. Spajic was identified as one of the early investors in Terraform Labs just days before its official registration in Singapore on April 23, 2018.
The disclosure was made in a court document filed by the SEC, contradicting Spajic’s previous claims that he had not personally invested in the failed crypto project. Instead, he had stated that Das Capital SG, a Singaporean company he had worked for from 2017 to 2020, was the investor in Terraform Labs. However, the SEC court documents listed him as one of the initial investors in the company, with a contract dated April 17, 2018.
Terraform Labs, responsible for the notorious LUNA and TerraUSD (UST) crypto tokens, saw their market cap peak at $2 billion before their collapse in May 2022, resulting in a loss of nearly $40 billion from the crypto market. The collapse of Terra not only impacted the crypto ecosystem financially but also led to the downfall of several crypto hedge funds that had provided collateral to the firm.
In April 2024, a jury found Terraform Labs and co-founder Do Kwon guilty of defrauding investors in their civil case with the SEC. Kwon, who had been evading authorities for months, was apprehended by international law enforcement agencies in March 2023.
The emergence of new documents confirming a direct contract between Spajic and Terraform Labs could potentially create issues for the prime minister for failing to disclose his personal investment in the project.