Pavel Durov, a co-founder of Telegram, was arrested on Saturday at the Paris-Le Bourget airport after traveling from Baku, Azerbaijan, via private jet.
He is charged with failing to control illicit activity on the network.
Durov, 39, a native of St Petersburg, Russia, co-founded VKontakte, one of the country’s most well-known social media networks, in 2007. He’s been likened to Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook.
He made news throughout the world in 2013 when he made a public employment offer to Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency and whistleblower.
Earlier this year, in an interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Durov stated that he was under pressure to provide Russian officials with information from 2014 accounts of pro-democracy activists in Ukraine, but he refused.
Durov sold his interest in VKontakte in 2014 and left the country as the Russian government strengthened its hold on the internet and President Vladimir Putin’s allies began to seize control of the platform.
Then, at the age of 28, he turned his attention to Telegram, an app he co-founded with his brother Nikolai.
According to Telegram, Durov is a citizen of both France and the United Arab Emirates and has been residing in Dubai. It’s uncertain if he renounced his Russian citizenship.
As of Sunday morning, Forbes, a business publication, pegged his wealth at $15.5 billion.
Durov has kept a low profile when it comes to moderation, portraying the app as private and restricted. However, a few analysts have issued a warning, stating that this strategy has made Telegram a hub for illegal activity and extremism.
He was arrested “for offenses alleged to have been conducted on Telegram, ranging from fraud, to drug trafficking, cyberbullying and organized crime, including promoting terrorism and fraud,” the AFP news agency reported.
Although politicians in the US and the EU have called for public hearings with executives of digital companies and penalized other social media platforms for breaking their laws, there is little evidence that these countries have detained prominent figures in the information industry.
A senior Facebook official was detained in Brazil in 2016 as a result of the firm withholding information from WhatsApp pertaining to a drug trafficking inquiry. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook’s parent business, which changed its name to Meta in 2021.
Telegram is a cloud-based chat app that was released in August 2013. Users of the platform can create groups for up to 200,000 people or channels for broadcasting to infinite audiences, and they can share messages, images, and huge files.
These characteristics, together with the app’s lax monitoring, make it the perfect place for people and organizations barred from major social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
With about one billion active users, the network has had a meteoric rise in popularity since its founding and has become a crucial medium for communication in conflict areas, such as the Russia-Ukraine war.
Based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is the current home of the Telegram development team.
