A court in France releases Telegram owner Pavel Durov on bail of 5 million euros. He has already left the courthouse in a car escorted by police. Durov’s detention stirred up millions of users, a wave of support for the businessman rose in Russia, and Europe and Ukraine once again started talking aloud about the messenger being a source of fakes, disinformation, and Russian narratives.
A court on Wednesday launched a formal investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov in an organized crime case, but he may avoid pre-trial detention if he posts bail of €5 million.
Durov has to report to the police twice a week and is banned from leaving the territory of France, Reuters reports.
As the agency explains, according to French law, the investigation does not mean that Durov is considered guilty or that he will stand trial. This decision only shows that the judges see enough grounds in the case to continue the investigation. It could last for years before it is transferred to the court for consideration on the merits, or it could be closed, Reuters explains.
Pavel Durov was detained at Paris’ Le Bourget airport on Saturday, August 24, where he arrived by private jet from Azerbaijan.
The French passport is one of the four that Durov has, according to media reports, in addition to his Russian citizenship. He left Russia back in 2014, but traveled there very often.
He founded the VKontakte network (he had to sell it), which is still the largest network in Russia and became the Russian answer to the American Facebook. Due to the threat to Ukraine’s national security, VKontakte was banned in Ukraine under President Petro Poroshenko.
According to the businessman himself, the number of users of Telegram, launched by Durov in 2013, is expected to exceed one billion worldwide by 2025. Forbes currently estimates his net worth at $15.5 billion, and Durov is ranked 122nd on the list of the world’s richest people.
On the weekend after the arrest, French law enforcement agencies did not immediately release information about the nature of the case and claims directly against the Telegram founder. Without waiting for official statements, the messenger’s representatives called attempts to blame the platform or its owner for the “abuse” of users “absurd.”
The importance that France attaches to Durov’s detention became clear when French President Emmanuel Macron made a statement on the matter, also before the national prosecutor’s office did.
He wrote in X that Durov’s arrest was “not a political decision” but part of a judicial proceeding, and that France remained committed to freedom of speech and entrepreneurship.
Only on Monday, the Paris prosecutor’s office published an official statement. It said that the case against the unnamed individuals was opened on July 8 after a preliminary investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office’s cybercrime unit.
The release listed 12 corpus delicti investigated by French investigators, including
Durov’s role was described as “complicity,” “aiding and abetting,” and “conspiracy,” but his procedural status – witness, suspect, etc. – was not specified.
In the same release, the prosecutor’s office said that Durov’s arrest had been extended for two days, until the evening of August 28, or the maximum 96 hours allowed.
On Wednesday, a few hours before the deadline, Politico wrote, citing a French document it had seen, that the case had been opened several months earlier than expected-in March, not June.
According to Politico, the investigation is related to Durov’s refusal to cooperate with French law enforcement, who requested data from the messenger about a user involved in the distribution of child pornography.
As part of this case, a search and arrest warrant was issued not only for Pavel Durov, but also for his older brother Nikolai, the co-founder of Telegram, Politico reports. Telegram did not comment on the report.
Telegram’s reputation largely rests on its founder’s refusal to cooperate with the security services and to hand over users’ personal data and encryption keys. This is done for privacy reasons.
Durov also explained this as a technical impossibility: according to him, the encryption system is designed in such a way that only the messenger users themselves have the keys.
According to Durov, pressure from security forces was one of the reasons why he was forced to sell his previous project, the VKontakte social network.
And the idea of creating a secure messenger – what later became Telegram – came to him during searches, he said in a recent interview with conservative American TV host Tucker Carlson.
Telegram’s privacy policy mentions one ground for disclosing user data (clause 8.3): “In the event of a court request regarding a terrorist suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant services… but so far there have been no such cases.”
The flip side of such anonymity and security is the possibility of using the messenger by malicious actors, abusing freedom of expression to the detriment of security.
This is how law enforcement and authorities in different countries often explain the need to tighten control over the platform, but there are also supporters of this view among ordinary netizens.
This opposition – the value of freedom versus the value of security – is the basis for the discussion that has unfolded on social media between those who consider the claims of French law enforcement against Durov to be repression and those who believe their actions are justified.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/articles/c703ll143d7o.amp
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