Telegram app founder's arrest 'in no way political', says Macron

Pavel Durov, the billionaire chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was detained at Le Bourget airport outside Paris

Pavel Durov, chief executive and co-founder of Telegram, is waiting to find out if he will face charges after his arrest in France. Getty Images

The billionaire Russian-French founder of the Telegram messaging app has been arrested on his private jet at an airport on the outskirts of Paris but the French government claims no political motive was involved.

Pavel Durov, who was detained by police at Le Bourget airport on Saturday, was the subject of an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation, sources told TF-1.

It is thought the investigation was focused on an alleged lack of moderators on Telegram, and that French police considered that this enabled criminal activity to go on undeterred on the app.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the arrest of Mr Durov, who is based in Dubai and has dual UAE-French citizenship, was “in no way a political decision” and that his case would be determined by a judge.

“It’s the judicial system that will independently enforce the law,” Mr Macron said in a post on X.

A magistrates must decide by Wednesday evening whether to press charges, release him without charges or name him as a witness in the investigation.

Telegram has an estimated 900 million global users and is one of the most popular apps of its kind in the world.

Together with his brother Nikolai, Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013. He left Russia a year later, after refusing to comply with Russian government demands that he shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform.

In an interview with the American journalist Tucker Carlson this year, Mr Durov said he would “rather be free than to take orders from anyone”. Following his departure from Russia, Mr Durov, whose fortune has been estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, searched for a base for his company for some time, spending stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.

Ukraine war

The Telegram platform has been extensively used by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his officials, as well as the Russian government, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

It became one of the few places where Russians and Ukrainians could access independent news about the conflict, after clampdowns on independent media following that outbreak of the war.

In 2018, Russia began blocking Telegram when the company refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users' encrypted messages.

Mr Durov has said in the past that certain governments had sought to pressure him but that Telegram should remain a neutral platform and not a “player in geopolitics”.

Nonetheless, as the app has became increasingly popular it attracted greater levels of scrutiny from officials concerned with security issues in several countries in Europe, including France.