Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday night, based on French media.
Sources instructed 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 prison 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 relies, 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 information 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, based on Forbes, which estimates Durov’s web price at $15.5 billion.
Telegram, which has about 900 million energetic customers, has grown in reputation as a approach to extra securely talk by way of its encrypted messages.
Whereas it has been utilized in battle zones in addition to by militant teams, Durov has mentioned Telegram is a impartial platform and never a “participant in geopolitics.”
