Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, was formally charged with crimes that include complicity in drug trafficking and distribution of child pornography, but released on August 28 after he posted €5mn bail. He was also ordered to report to police twice a week and not to leave France.

Durov is reportedly being charged under Article 323-3-2 of France's Criminal Code on complicity in committing a crime, which only went into force in February and provides for the 10 year jail sentence and €500,000 fine cited in this press release. The charges include "dissemination in an organised group of images of minors in child pornography" as well as drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering.

“The only statement I’d wish to make is that Telegram is in conformity with every aspect of European norms on digital matters. It is absurd to think that the head of a social network is being charged,” Durov’s lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski said after the announcement.

The Article creates liability for "a person whose activity consists of providing an online platform service" who is "knowingly allowing the transfer of products, content or services whose transfer, offer, acquisition or possession is manifestly illicit".

If found guilty, this is punishable by five years of imprisonment and a fine of €150,000. If they carry out this offence as part of a 'criminal gang', they can be imprisoned for 10 years and fined €500,000.

The charges against Durov accuse him of "web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in an organised group." Durov has also been charged with the lesser crimes of refusing to cooperate with an investigation and refusal to share documents demanded by authorities.

“Durov has reached a preliminary agreement with the French authorities.. In my opinion, this is the first step towards a long-term agreement that Durov will have to reach with Paris in order to avoid going to prison. Telegram will be forced to invest money in regulating content and in complying with other EU requirements regarding the security of the online context on this messaging platform,” political analysts and bne IntelliNews columnist Denis Cenusa said in a social media post.

After being held for four days after being arrested on August 24 after leaving his private jet at Le Bourget airport near Paris, the Russian-born tech guru was arrested on the tarmac as part of a French investigation of criminal activity being conducted on his Telegram messaging service.

Durov, a St Petersburg native who also holds Russian, UAE and Saint Kitts and Nevis passports, obtained French citizenship in 2021 but reportedly resides in Dubai.

Governments in Paris, Moscow and Abu Dhabi have been drawn into a diplomatic furore after Durov’s sensational arrest as one of the world’s most powerful tech entrepreneurs, which also ignited a fierce debate about online free speech and technology regulation.

Russia’s embassy in Paris says requests for consular access to Durov while he was in detention were ignored. The UAE is also watching the case closely, as Durov is a citizen of the Emirates.

Durov faces a total of 12 counts including serious accusations such as drug trafficking, money laundering, withholding crucial information from investigators and specifically highlights crimes related to child pornography, according to a press release issued by French authorities on August 28. In a rare interview with the Financial Times in March, Durov said child abuse material and public calls for violence were “red lines” for Telegram.

The reclusive Durov rarely talks to the press, preferring to interact with the public via his own Telegram channel. He caused a stir last month when he claimed as a sperm donor, he now had more than 100 biological children.

French investigators had previously approached Telegram and asked for permission to access messages of some users that were under investigation, however, Telegram refused the request. Durov is famous for not only refusing almost all requests by authorities to access the service, but also the almost total lack of moderation of the service. While its terms and conditions has a statement saying illegal content cannot be posted in the public part of the service, it fails to extend that ban to messages circulated in private chat groups.

Politicians, business leaders and even the military widely use Telegram due to its reputation of being uncrackable. French President Emmanuel Macron, who lunched with Durov in 2018 and invited him to move his headquarters to France, this week admitted that he is a regular user of Telegram. Both the Russian and Ukrainian military also routinely use Telegram in the ongoing war to pass orders and share intelligence amongst their commands.

France issued arrest warrants for both Pavel Durov and his brother and co-founder of Telegram, Nikolai Durov, in February after Telegram’s "near total absence of a response" after French police sent official requests for cooperation in their investigation into organised crime groups, using the messaging service.

“When consulted, other French investigation departments and public prosecutors’ offices, as well as various Eurojust partners, notably Belgian, shared the same observation,” a French press release added. “This led… to opening an investigation into the possible criminal responsibility of the managers of this messaging service.” The French investigation then focused on Telegram itself, starting in July according to earlier AFP reports, which is now believed to be more extensive than was initially thought.

Durov, who is worth $15.5bn according to Forbes, left Russia in 2014 after he was forced out of his previous company, Vkontakte, Russia’s answer to Facebook (now called VK Group), and clashing with the Federal Security Service (FSB) after he refused to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on Vkontakte.

Durov is being charged under the newly introduced EU Digital Services Act, an attempt by the authorities to impose some regulation on “very large social media platforms”. Despite claiming to have almost a billion users worldwide Telegram disputes the claim that ‘very large social media platforms’ applies to the company as it claims to have only 41mn users in the EU, less than the 45mn threshold needed to qualify as “very large” under the Digital Services Act.

Child abuse

Among the charges against Durov, one of the most damaging is that Telegram has been used by paedophiles to distribute abusive child pornography. Telegram has refused to join international programmes aimed at detecting and removing child abuse material online, the BBC reports.

The app is not a member of either the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) or the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) - both of which work with most online platforms to find, report and remove such material.

Telegram said in a statement earlier this week that it follows EU laws and do not promote illegal or harmful content on its platform, including child abuse material. The company insisted that its moderation is "within industry standards and constantly improving".

However, unlike all other social networks, Telegram has not signed up to programmes like NCMEC’s CyberTipline, where users and companies have reported problematic sites, membership of which is legally mandated in the US.

The BBC reported that NCMEC has repeatedly asked Telegram to join to help fight abusive child sexual material but Telegram, which is based in Dubai, has ignored requests. Telegram also refuses to work with the UK’s equivalent Internet Watch Foundation. Telegram is also not a part of the TakeItDown programme that works to remove so-called revenge porn. Snap, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Pornhub and OnlyFans are all members of the scheme.

Russia connection

Durov claims he has been effectively exiled from Russia. Reports from August 27 by Kremlingram, a Ukrainian Telegram channel advocating against the use of Telegram in Ukraine, and Russian investigative outlet iStories suggest that Durov has visited Russia between 50 and 60 times since his departure in 2014.

However, since then Durov has travelled back to his native St Petersburg on multiple occasions and Telegram maintains an apartment office on Nevsky Prospect in the heart of the northern capital. Durov has claimed that Telegram only employs a total of between 30 and 60 people, at different locations, some of whom remain based in Russia.

According to iStories, Durov’s visits were connected to the passage of the so-called Yarovaya law in 2018, also known as the Big Brother law, which requires companies to let the FSB access user messaging data, and even after the Kremlin launched a propaganda campaign against Durov’s app Telegram and then tried to close it down that year.

Durov next returned to Russia in the summer of 2020, soon after a US court blocked Telegram from launching a cryptocurrency called Gram, according to iStories, when the law attempting to block Telegram was removed. At the time Durov vowed to support the Russian authorities if they wanted to fight terrorism without violating citizens’ right to secrecy of correspondence.

On June 18, 2020, Russia’s federal censorship agency announced that it was “unblocking” Telegram in light of Durov’s “stated willingness to counteract terrorism and extremism.”

In the next two years Durov was in and out of Russia and started to block accounts more actively as part of the new compromise with the Kremlin, including that of the late opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s Smart Voting bot (designed to help Russians mobilise against ruling party candidates), and other opposition tools ahead of the September 2021 State Duma elections.

After Durov left Russia an office was opened in London in 2014 but closed in 2019, and the company moved to Dubai in the UAE to the Kazim Towers skyscraper. Spiegel journalists visited the Telegram office in Dubai in 2021, but claim that it was empty, raising questions over where Telegram has its centre of operations. The building's concierge told Spiegel reporters that she had not seen anyone enter the office for more than three years, reports Ukrainian outlet texty.org.ua as part of an investigation into Durov’s business.

Telegram remains one of the most popular social media platforms in Ukraine, but there has been a campaign for Ukrainians to abandon the service due to its suspected ties with the Kremlin. A September 2023 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology revealed that 44% of Ukrainians use Telegram to receive information and news. The platform is also widely used by Ukrainian officials and various government institutions, despite warnings from Ukraine's TV and radio-broadcasting authority to avoid using it.

Anton Rosenberg, who worked for many years at VKontakte and later at Telegram, told texty.org.ua that as of September 2017, Telegram's office was located on Nevsky Prospekt in Singer's house in St Petersburg.

Telegram uses the services of two data partners to transfer data: GlobalNet LLC and RETN, which are registered in Russia although the companies also have a registration in Holland. Under Russian law, social media companies have to store their user data on servers in Russia and following Durov’s meetings in 2020 and the nix of the Telegram ban law, texty.org.ua speculates that Telegram continues to store much of its user data on Russian servers. 

Russia remains one of Telegram's key markets, where GlobalNet and RETN have their own servers and data channels. According to the GeoLite2 service, which shows the geographic location of IP addresses, as of September 2023, at least one of the telegram.org servers was still located in St Petersburg.

The investigations also identified at least three Telegram employees on LinkedIn that say their place of residence is Russia, although the majority of the team appear to have emigrated.

Update details from the French press

The French press provided more details of the case after Durov was released. Le Monde reported that Durov met with French President Emmanuel Macron not once, but several times before receiving citizenship. Moreover, Macron allegedly convinced Durov to move his headquarters to France, and the emergency mechanism that allowed Durov to become a French citizen in 2021 was used by him without sufficient grounds. Meetings with Durov were not included in Macron's official schedule, the publication notes, but were mentioned in the application for citizenship, The Bell reported.

Macron has been a Telegram user since the mid-2010s and still uses it to communicate with officials and leaders of his party, Le Monde writes. In principle, this has been prohibited since 2023: French officials are required to work with the secure messenger Olvid.

The American Forbes wrote that Durov is under investigation in Switzerland for using violence against his own children. According to the publication, the lawsuit was filed by Irina Bolgar, who called herself the mother of the businessman's three children. By the evening, AFP reported that a similar investigation was underway in France, and that Durov's son, born in 2017, who studied in Paris, was involved in it. It is possible that this is the same child as in the Swiss case, The Bell says.

The German authorities have also joined in accusing Telegram of insufficient cooperation with law enforcement. There are platforms that provide information very quickly and reliably within the framework of "legally permitted" requests, but Telegram is not one of them, Deutsche Welle quotes a representative of the anti-extremist intelligence service BfV.

At the same time, Brussels is investigating whether Telegram understated the number of users in Europe in order to avoid strict regulation under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The threshold for regulation is 45mn people, the messenger reported 42mn. Violators of the law's requirements face fines of up to 6% of the annual global turnover. And in case of repeated violations, a ban on work in the EU is possible.