The founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was reportedly arrested at a French airport after disembarking from a private plane.
Police arrested the billionaire shortly after he landed at Bourget Airport outside Paris after flying from Azerbaijan, French news portal TF1 info reported, citing an anonymous source.
Durov travelled on board his private jet, the news site added, adding that an arrest warrant had been issued against him in France.
The 39-year-old technology magnate was reportedly arrested around 8 p.m. local time accompanied by his bodyguard.
The founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was reportedly arrested at a French airport after disembarking from a private plane
Durov founded the app in 2013 together with his brother Nikolai (stock image)
Although Durov was born in Russia, he has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and Donbass in Ukraine in 2014.
Durov now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds dual citizenship of France and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2014, he was quoted by TechCrunch as saying, “I have no business in Russia and have no plans to return there. I no longer have Russian citizenship.”
Durov founded the app in 2013 with his brother Nikolai. It now has 950 million active users who can send messages, photos and videos, participate in chats for groups of up to 200,000 people and broadcast to an unlimited audience.
Telegram is intended to compete with WhatsApp and allows users to have “secret chats” where messages are stored on the device rather than in the cloud. It can also be set to automatically delete messages after a certain period of time.
Mr Durov, whose fortune is estimated at around £12 billion, said in an interview earlier this year that Telegram would remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
But the UK government insists social media companies like Telegram must do more to prevent extremists from abusing their services for criminal purposes.
Campaign group Counter Extremism Project said Telegram had taken some steps to limit terrorists’ use of its platform, but commented on its website: “It is clear that more can and should be done.”
