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Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said that the French authorities used “surprising” arguments when they arrested him at a Paris airport last month.
The Russian-French businessman was detained after landing at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on August 24 and released on bail several days later. He was charged with 12 counts, including complicity in distributing child porn, drug dealing and money laundering. The charges stem from the accusation that Telegram’s lax moderation rules allow for the widespread use of the platform by criminals.
Durov released a lengthy statement on Telegram on Thursday night, arguing that the position of the prosecution was “surprising for several reasons.”
“If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself,” Durov wrote. “Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
According to the tech billionaire, the police told him that he could be “personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.”
Durov dismissed the claim that his company was hard to reach, noting that Telegram has an official representative in the EU that replies to requests. “Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles ‘Telegram EU address for law enforcement,’‘‘ he wrote.
“The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance,” he continued, adding that he was “a frequent guest” at the French consulate in Dubai.
Durov was born in Russia but has lived in Dubai since the late 2010s. He is also a citizen of France, the UAE, and the Caribbean nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
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