Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday night, in response to French media.
Sources informed the TV community TF1 that he was arrested on the Bourget airport outdoors Paris after touring in his personal jet from Azerbaijan.
The report added {that a} warrant had been issued as a part of a police investigation into an absence of moderators on Telegram, which allowed felony 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 offer encrypted consumer 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, in response to Forbes, which estimates Durov’s internet value at $15.5 billion.
Telegram, which has about 900 million energetic customers, has grown in reputation as a technique 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 “player in geopolitics.”
