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Russian-French billionaire Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening (August 24), TF1 and BFM TV reported, citing unnamed sources.
Durov was travelling on a private plane, TF1 reported on its website, adding that France had issued a warrant for his arrest as part of a preliminary police investigation.
Both TF1 and BFM said the investigation focused on Telegram’s lack of moderators, a situation police believe allowed criminal activity to proceed unhindered on the messaging app.
The encrypted app Telegram has nearly 1 billion users and is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet republics. It is one of the main 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 also declined to comment.
Russian-born Durov co-founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 and sold the platform after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his social media platform VKontakte.
In April this year, Durov said in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson: “I would rather be free than take orders from anyone.” He left Russia to look for a headquarters for the company and worked in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became a major source of unfiltered (and sometimes explicit and misleading) content from both sides about the war and the politics of the conflict.
The platform has become what some analysts call a “virtual battlefield” of war, used extensively by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin increased restrictions on independent media, and Telegram became one of the few places Russians could get independent news about the war, allowing users to evade official censorship.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying Durov’s situation and called on Western non-governmental organizations to demand his release.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after it refused to comply with a court order allowing state security services to access its users’ encrypted messages.
The move caused disruptions to many third-party services but had little impact on Telegram’s availability in Moscow. However, the ban sparked large protests in Moscow and criticism from non-governmental organizations.
“Neutral Platform”
TF1 said Durov, who lives in Dubai, travelled from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8pm (18:00 GMT).
Durov, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had tried to pressure him but that the app was supposed to be a “neutral platform” and not a “geopolitical player.”
However, Telegram’s growing popularity has sparked concern in several European countries, including France, due to concerns about security and data breaches.
Russia’s representative to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick on Sunday to accuse France of dictatorship — the same criticism Moscow faced when it made its demands on Durov in 2014 and when it tried to ban Telegram in 2018.
“Some naive people still do not understand that it is unsafe for them to visit countries that are on the path to totalitarian societies if they play a more or less visible role in the international information sphere,” Ulyanov wrote on the X website.
Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, said after reports of Durov’s detention: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you can be executed for liking a meme.”
Several Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies around the world at noon on Sunday.
Read more by Euractiv
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