PARIS (Reuters) – Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unnamed sources.
Telegram, which is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union, is one of the leading social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat. It aims to reach one billion users next year.
Dubai-based Telegram was founded by Russian-born Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he later sold.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding that he had been the subject of an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
Both TF1 and BFM said the investigation focused on the lack of moderators on Telegram and that police believed this situation allowed criminal activity to continue undeterred on the messaging app.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police did not comment.
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the primary source of unfiltered (and sometimes graphic and misleading) content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
The app has become the preferred means of communication for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials. The Kremlin and the Russian government also use it to spread their news. It has also become one of the few places where Russians can access news about the war.
TF1 said Durov had travelled from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8:00 p.m. (18:00 GMT).
Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had tried to pressure him but the app, which now has 900 million active users, should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics.”
The Russian embassy in France told Russian state news agency TASS that Durov’s team had not contacted them after reports of the arrest but that it was taking “immediate” steps to clarify the situation.
Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick to accuse France of acting like a dictatorship.
“Some naive people still do not understand that if they play a more or less visible role in the international information space, it is not safe for them to visit countries that are moving towards much more totalitarian societies,” Ulyanov wrote in X.
Several Russian bloggers have called for protests at French embassies around the world on Sunday afternoon.
(Reporting by Ingrid Melander and Gilles Guillaume in Paris and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by David Gregorio)
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