Telegram: Who he is and why 39-year-old billionaire Pavel Durov was arrested – “It is enough with impunity”

Salos has been challenged with the arrest of the 39-year-old billionaire founder of Pavel Durov yesterday (24.08). 24) in the evening at Bourget International Airport, near Paris. At the expense of Pavel Durov he was pending a search warrant from French justice in the context of an investigation into various Telegram violations, which, among other things, allows for the exchange of encrypted messages, as reported to his French Agency sources adjacent to the process, confirming information from TF1 and LCI television networks. Surrounded by a bodyguard and his assistant who permanently accompanies him, the billionaire with double — French and Russian — citizenship, 39, was arrested in Burze in the period from 19:30 to 20:00 (local hours; 20:30 to 21:00 hours of Greece), specified one of the sources. He had departed Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and was to stay overnight in Paris, where he planned to dine, according to the same sources. He is expected to be brought before a judge within the day to be charged. “He thought he had absolute impunity” OFMIN, responsible for prosecuting crimes against minors, had proceeded to issue a search warrant against Mr Durov, as she has taken on a coordinating role in a preliminary investigation into various offences — from fraud as a drug trafficking, online harassment, organised crime, and even an exclamation of terrorism — according to one of the sources. In practice, French justice accuses Pavel Durov of being left unbroken (absence of any control, lack of cooperation with the prosecution authorities) despite the illegal use of the platform by its subscribers. “It is enough with the impunity of Telegram,” one of the researchers said with a surprise that the billionaire, although he knew he was wanted in France, decided to travel to Paris. “Maybe because of the feeling that he has absolute impunity,” he commented one of the sources. Russia’s embassy in Paris takes “direct measures” to clarify the situation around Mr. Durov, broadcast in the early morning the Russian state news agency TASS. The who is who of the founder of Telegram The platform was founded in 2013 by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. Their aim was to create an alternative to the major American social networking sites, often criticized for commercial exploitation of their users’ personal data. Telegram is committed to never revealing data from its users. In one of the few interviews he has given, Pavel Durov recounted last April in Dubai that the idea of creating an encrypted message exchange service began to consolidate within him after he was under a lot of pressure from the Russian authorities at the time he was working at the VK, a social networking site he created home before selling him and leaving Russia in 2014. Then he tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore, San Francisco, before eventually choosing Dubai, which excels for its business environment and “neutrality”. “I think we’re doing well with Telegram,” which has ‘900 million users that will probably exceed the billion active users within a year,” he said. In the Gulf emirate, Telegram is protected from the regulations and controls of other states, as the European Union and the US are lobbying on large platforms to delete content that characterizes illegal. According to Mr Durov, which Forbes magazine estimates has $15.5 billion in property, some governments want to push him, but he believes that his platform should remain “neutral” rather than “play geopolitical games”. With discussion groups that sometimes exceed 200,000 members, the implementation has been accused of facilitating the spread of false content news with hate, neo-Nazi, conspiracy, as well as the action of circuits of paedophiles and terrorist organizations. “It’s 2030 and in Europe you’re executed because you liked a meme”. Russian diplomacy spokesman Maria Zaharova wondered whether and whether Western NGOs would ask the French authorities to release Mr Durov. “Do you think (…) how they will address appeals to Paris, asking for Durov’s release, or will they keep their mouths shut?”, he commented via Telegram. Russia’s representative to international organizations in Vienna Michael Ulyanov argued from his point of view that France acts as a “dictatorship”, in an “a multi-polar” way, a charge that the West often makes to Moscow, such as when it had made demands to Mr Durov in 2014 and when he had tried to outlaw Telegram in 2018. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and owner of X (the former Twitter), commented after Pavel Durov was arrested: “It’s 2030 and in Europe you’re executed because you liked a meme”. While Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who yesterday Friday ended his campaign and advocated Republican candidate Donald Trump for the US presidency, considered that the need to protect the “freedom of speech”, as he sees it, “never was more urgent.” Many Russian social networking websites users called for demonstrations in front of French embassies around the world at noon.