No sooner had he landed than he had been arrested! The boss of the encrypted messaging service Telegram was arrested by French police on Saturday at Le Bourget airport. Under a search warrant in France, the billionaire of Russian origin, who has been naturalized French for three years, was due to appear before a judge on Sunday. The founder of Telegram was coming from Baku (Azerbaijan) and was due to spend at least the evening in Paris, where he had planned to have dinner, according to AFP.
The 39-year-old will have to answer for the laxity and lack of moderation that he claims to have on the messaging service with 900 million users that he co-founded with his brother Nikolai. After an initial success in Russia with the creation of a Facebook in Cyrillic in 2006 (VKontakte), the duo presented themselves as opponents of the Kremlin’s stranglehold on local tech with this application promising total secrecy of correspondence.
Libertarian Mantra
The problem is that this libertarian mantra has attracted privacy-hungry politicians as much as criminals, terrorists and pedophile networks. While the use of the application by suspects comes up very frequently in various investigations, Telegram – unlike its rival WhatsApp – does not cooperate at all with the police. The French justice system therefore took up the case.
In detail, the OFMIN, responsible for combating violence against minors, had been interested in Pavel Durov for several months in coordination with other services in order to establish his possible complicity as CEO of Telegram for offences ranging from fraud to drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime, and the glorification of terrorism and fraud. “In France, the attacks of 2015 and 2016 had already highlighted the privileged role of Telegram in relaying propaganda, recruitment and financing of terrorism,” recalls Julien Nocetti, associate researcher specialising in Russia and technology at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri).
This arrest comes at a time when Pavel Durov was seeing success coming for his application. In an interview with the “Financial Times” a few months ago, he insisted on monetizing his audience. According to him, Telegram generates “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenue through advertising space in the application, fees on cryptocurrency payments and premium subscriptions. Even if the step is high and the company’s debt remains significant, he aimed to make it a profitable business in 2025, or even as early as 2024. He also floated the idea of a listing on Wall Street.
But the boss’s sulphurous reputation continued to haunt him. In the context of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the displayed independence of the businessman exiled in Dubai did not convince everyone, while it seems impossible that he could have found success in Russia without links to the government. On channels that can bring together thousands of people, Telegram is also an important relay for disinformation of Russian origin. His arrest sparked many international reactions. “#FreePavel”, posted on X the boss of the platform, Elon Musk, before publishing a new message in French saying “Freedom. Freedom! Freedom?”
