Who is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram arrested in France? What are the reasons?
Russian-born billionaire and founder of the Telegram messaging service, was arrested at an airport outside of Paris after he arrived aboard his private jet.
French authorities arrested Pavel Durov when he landed at Le Bourget Airport just north of Paris according to French media reports. The 39-year-old billionaire and founder of the popular messaging app Telegram had just arrived aboard his private jet from Azerbaijan.
TF1 TV and BFM TV report that Russian-born Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirati citizenship, was arrested on a warrant for offenses related to his messaging app, which is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. The social media platform has nearly one billion users and is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Durov was detained by officials from the national antifraud office on a multitude of offences related to his social media platform not moderating content such as terrorism, drugs, fraud, money laundering, moving stolen goods and child abuse, thus making him an accomplice to those crimes. “On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed, for which he did nothing to moderate or cooperate”, a source close to the case commented to TF1 TV.
“Over the years, it has become THE number one platform for organized crime,” said an investigator.
Who is Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram arrested in France? What are the reasons?
Durov and his brother founded Telegram in 2013. Forbes estimates that the tech entrepreneur has built a fortune of $15.5 billion.
He fled his birth nation of Russia in 2014 after refusing to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold, as demanded by the Russian government. Speaking to former Fox commentator Tucker Carlson in April about why he had to leave Russia, Durov said, “I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone.”
He finally settled in Dubai in 2017, where he now has citizenship, after shopping around for a new home for Telegram in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco. He obtained French citizenship in August 2021 and reportedly is a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, a dual-island nation in the Caribbean.
Russia started blocking Telegram in 2018 when the company refused to comply with a court order to give security services access to users’ encrypted messages. While that had little effect on the availability of the platform it caused large protests in Moscow.
Telegram has been used widely by both Russia and Ukraine to disseminate information and propaganda about the ongoing armed conflict between the two to such an extent that the social media platform is considered “a virtual battlefield” for the war by some analysts.
Its increased popularity has drawn scrutiny on security and data breach concerns from several European countries among them France. Tech regulators from the European Commission have been in touch with Telegram as the number of EU users approaches a critical threshold that requires Big Tech companies to meet stricter rules on policing content on their platforms.