Telegram boss Pavel Durov was arrested on Saturday evening, August 24, 2024 at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, after a search warrant was issued against him by French investigators targeting various violations of his encrypted messaging service.
Franco-Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, head of the encrypted messaging service Telegram, arrested Saturday evening at Le Bourget airport in the Paris region, was released from police custody and transferred early Wednesday afternoon to the Paris courthouse with a view to possible indictment, AFP learned from a source close to the case.
Arrested at Le Bourget
Aged 39, Pavel Durov was arrested on Saturday in the Bourget airport terminal, while he was due to spend the evening in Paris where he was expected for a dinner. The French justice system accuses him of not taking action against the dissemination of criminal or offending content on Telegram, which has more than 900 million users.
As a reminder, it was in 2006, having just graduated from the University of Saint Petersburg (Russia), the city where he was born on October 10, 1984, that Pavel Durov became known by launching the social network VKontakte (VK), which quickly became the first in Russia ahead of Facebook and earned him the nickname “Mark Zuckerberg russe”.
But VK’s success caused friction and Durov, after selling the platform – taken over by people close to the government – left Russia in 2014. He was then in a difficult situation with the Kremlin for having refused to hand over the personal data of users, particularly Ukrainian pro-European activists, to the Russian security services (FSB).
Developing the Telegram messaging service with his brother Nikolai – launched in 2013 – while traveling from country to country, he settled in Dubai and obtained citizenship of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and Nevis, then, in August 2021, French nationality thanks to a rare procedure on which Paris remains very discreet.
According to the magazine ForbesPavel Durov’s fortune is estimated at 15.5 billion dollars (13.38 billion euros) in 2024, but toncoin, the cryptocurrency he created, has plummeted by more than 15% since the announcement of his arrest.
Spreading conspiracy theories, calls for murder, drug sales platform: for years, Telegram has been in the sights of European judicial authorities. Pavel Durov, however, assures that he responds to every request to remove content calling for violence or murder.
Many experts remain skeptical about the real security offered by Telegram. If the platform claims to be “safer than mass messaging services like WhatsApp”it does not encrypt messages by default, unlike Facebook’s subsidiary.
And the platform has regularly collaborated with judicial authorities: in 2022, threatened with blocking by the Brazilian Supreme Court, Telegram agreed to close accounts accused of disinformation. The same year, Germany welcomed the discussions “constructive” with messaging, popular with local far-right or anti-vax activists.
