Telegram messaging app CEO Pavel Durov arrested in France, say French media
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Mr Pavel Durov, seen here in a 2015 photo, was arrested at an airport near Paris under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app, officials said.
PHOTO: AFP
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PARIS - Pavel Durov, billionaire founder and chief executive officer of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on the evening of Aug 24, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unnamed sources.
He was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding that he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
The encrypted Telegram, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police had no comment.
Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he sold.
“I would rather be free than take orders from anyone,” he told US journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company, which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
Mr Durov was expected to appear in court on Aug 25, said AFP.
France’s Ofmin, an agency tasked with preventing violence against minors, had issued an arrest warrant for him as the coordinating agency in a preliminary investigation into alleged offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime and promotion of terrorism, one of the sources close to the case said.
He is suspected of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one of the investigators, adding they were surprised Mr Durov came to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading – content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
The platform has become what some analysts call “a virtual battlefield” for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
Telegram – which allows users to evade official scrutiny – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased curbs on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Mr Durov and called on Western non-governmental organisations to demand his release.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.
The action interrupted many third-party services, but had little effect on the availability of Telegram there. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
‘Neutral platform’
TF1 said Mr Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8pm local time (2am Singapore time).
Mr Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at US$15.5 billion (S$20.1 billion), said some governments had sought to pressure him, but the app, which has now 900 million active users, should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mr Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick to accuse France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Mr Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.
“Some naive persons still don’t understand that if they play more or less visible role in international information space, it is not safe for them to visit countries which move towards much more totalitarian societies,” Mr Ulyanov wrote on X.
Mr Elon Musk, billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said after reports of Mr Durov’s detention: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”
Several Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies throughout the world at noon on Aug 25. REUTERS, AFP
