The founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris. He was detained after arriving in his private area under a court order related to the Telegram app. The specific reason for the arrest has not yet been revealed.
Pavel Durov is the 39-year-old founder and CEO of the messaging app. Telegramwhich is one of the five most downloaded apps in the world and has more than 950 million active users, according to its official website.
Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov in 2013. Pavel Durov provides financial and ideological support, while Nikolai Durov provides technological support.
According to Forbes magazine, Pavel Durov is known as RussiaZuckerberg created Vkontakte, known as Russia’s largest social network, at the age of 22 and has an estimated fortune of $15.5 billion.
Durov became a French He became a citizen of the United Arab Emirates in August 2021. He moved to Dubai with Telegram in 2017 and, according to French media, has also received UAE citizenship. He is also a citizen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a two-island nation in the Caribbean, according to media reports.
Pavel Durov has been forced to leave Russia after failing to cooperate with the Russian secret service in providing encrypted data on users of his social network, Forbes magazine reported.
In 2018, Russia began blocking Telegram after it failed to comply with a court order allowing security services to access its users’ encrypted messages. This sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs, according to a Reuters report.
The report also cites an excerpt from an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in which Durov talks about leaving Russia. “I prefer to be free than to take orders from anyone,” he said.
The AFP news agency also cited another excerpt from the same interview in which Durov mentioned that the idea of creating an encrypted messaging app came to him after being pressured by the Russian government when he was working at VK. He said that he planned to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before settling in Dubai. He appreciated Dubai for its business environment and “neutrality.”
“People love independence. They also love privacy, freedom, (there are) many reasons why someone would switch to Telegram,” Durov said.
In 2018, Pavel and Nikolai raised $1.7 billion from investors to create a blockchain system called TON, which was shut down after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission banned it in violation of federal securities laws, according to reports.
According to Forbes, Telegram has become a key source of information and much misinformation during the war between Russia and Ukraine.
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