The boss of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested on Saturday evening at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, a search warrant being launched against him by French investigators targeting various offenses in his encrypted messaging, we learned from sources close to the matter, confirming information from TF1 and LCI.
Accompanied by his bodyguard and his assistant who follow him constantly, the 39-year-old Franco-Russian billionaire was arrested at the Bourget airport between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. (between 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. GMT), one of these sources told AFP.
He came from Baku (Azerbaijan) and was to spend at least the evening in Paris where he had planned to have dinner, added another source close to the matter.
He is expected to appear in court on Sunday.
OFMIN, responsible for combating violence against minors, had issued a search warrant against Pavel Durov, as part of the coordinating service of a preliminary investigation bringing together various investigative services for offenses ranging from fraud, trafficking of narcotics, cyberharassment, organized crime, including the apology of terrorism and fraud, explained one of the sources close to the matter.
Justice accuses Pavel Durov of not acting (lack of moderation and collaboration with investigators) against the criminal uses of his messaging by his subscribers.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity!” said one of the investigators, surprised that the billionaire, knowing he was wanted in France, still decided to come to Paris. “Perhaps out of a feeling of impunity,” said one of the sources close to the matter.
Encrypted messaging
The online messaging launched in 2013 by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolaï, in which communications are end-to-end encrypted and whose head office is in Dubai, has positioned itself against the trend of American platforms, criticized for their commercial exploitation of personal data.
It is committed to never revealing information about its users.
During one of his rare interviews, Pavel Durov said last April in Dubai that he had the idea of launching encrypted messaging, after having suffered a lot of pressure from the Russian authorities at the time of VK, a social network that he created in its home country before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014.
He said he then tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore, and San Francisco before opting for Dubai, whose business environment and “neutrality” he praised.
“I think we’re doing a good job with Telegram, with 900 million users that will probably exceed 1 billion active monthly users within a year,” he said.
In the Gulf emirate, Telegram has sheltered itself from state moderation rules, when the European Union and the United States are putting pressure on large platforms to remove illegal content.
With its discussion groups of up to 200,000 people, messaging is sometimes accused of increasing the viral potential of false information and the proliferation of hateful, neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiratorial, or terrorist content.
