Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday night, in response to French media.
Sources advised the TV community TF1 that he was arrested on the Bourget airport exterior Paris after touring in his non-public jet from Azerbaijan.
The report added {that a} warrant had been issued as a part of a police investigation into a scarcity of moderators on Telegram, which allowed legal exercise to happen.
Telegram didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from Fortune.
Durov was born in Russia and lives in Dubai, the place Telegram is predicated, carrying twin citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates.
He and his brother Nikolai based Telegram in 2013 however left Russia in 2014 after he refused to supply encrypted person knowledge to Russia’s secret service and refusing to close down opposition communities on a separate social community that he later bought.
He moved to Dubai in 2017 and have become a French citizen in 2021, in response to Forbes, which estimates Durov’s web value at $15.5 billion.
Telegram, which has about 900 million energetic customers, has grown in reputation as a strategy to extra securely talk through its encrypted messages.
Whereas it has been utilized in battle zones in addition to by militant teams, Durov has stated Telegram is a impartial platform and never a “player in geopolitics.”
