Pavel Durov, the boss of Telegram, was arrested this Saturday evening, August 24 at Le Bourget airport, near Paris, a search warrant having been issued against him by French investigators targeting various violations of his encrypted messaging service, AFP learned from sources close to the case, confirming information from TF1 and LCI.
At the time of his arrest, the 39-year-old Franco-Russian billionaire was accompanied by his bodyguard and his assistant, who follow him constantly. He had come from Baku (Azerbaijan) and was due to spend at least the evening in Paris where he had planned to have dinner, added another source close to the case. He should be brought before the courts this Sunday.
The OFMIN, responsible for combating violence against minors, had issued a search warrant against Pavel Durov, as the coordinating service of a preliminary investigation involving various investigative services for offences ranging from fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime, and the glorification of terrorism and fraud, explained one of the sources close to the case. The justice system accuses Pavel Durov of not taking action (lack of moderation and collaboration with investigators) against the criminal uses of his messaging service by his subscribers.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one of the investigators, surprised that the billionaire, knowing that he was wanted in France, had decided to come to Paris anyway. “Perhaps out of a sense of impunity,” said one of the sources close to the case.
The day after Pavel Durov’s arrest, the Russian embassy in Paris accused the French authorities of “refusing to cooperate” with Moscow. “We immediately asked the French authorities to explain the reasons for this detention and demanded that his rights be protected and that he be granted consular access. To this day, the French side still refuses to cooperate on this issue,” it said, quoted by the Ria Novosti news agency.
Encrypted messaging
The online messaging service launched in 2013 by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai, on which communications are encrypted from end to end and whose headquarters are in Dubai, has positioned itself against the grain of American platforms, criticized for their commercial exploitation of personal data. It has committed to never revealing information about its users.
In one of his rare interviews, Pavel Durov said last April in Dubai that he had the idea of launching an encrypted messaging service after having been subjected to a lot of pressure from the Russian authorities at the time of VK, a social network that he created in his home country before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014.
He said he then tried to set up in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before settling on Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality.” “I think we are doing a good job with Telegram, with 900 million users that will probably exceed one billion monthly active users within a year,” he said.
In the Gulf emirate, Telegram has protected itself from state moderation rules, at a time when the European Union and the United States are putting pressure on major platforms to remove illegal content. With its discussion groups that can accommodate up to 200,000 people, the messaging service is sometimes accused of increasing the viral potential of false information and the proliferation of hateful, neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiracy or terrorist content.