Serious accusations. This Sunday, May 19, there was talk of the Telegram chief, Pavel Durov, accusing France of “interference” in the Romanian presidential elections. “A government in Western Europe has contacted Telegram to ask us to silence the conservative voices in Romania before today’s presidential elections,” he said in X, adding “guess what” with an emoji in the form of a wand of bread as an index.
While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs denounced “completely unfounded accusations”, Pavel Durov went further by saying that French intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner asked him to “prohibit conversational voices in Romania before the elections”, but that he refused.
Conflict with Russia
The accusations of the Telegram chief, which crossed the one billion billion users last March, intervened while the social network and the same are in the viewfinder of the French authorities.
His real name Pavela Valerievitch Dourov, who is also the founder of the email was arrested last August, under a French research mandate due to the use of its platform for laundering money, sharing pedocriminal content or drug trafficking.
Uses related to the fact that messages are encrypted from beginning to end in Telegram. In other words, only the sender and the recipient have access to him. The application was also criticized for its lack of moderation and collaboration with justice.
Pavel Durov was accused of complicity in criminal activities and released under judicial supervision at the end of August. While he was forbidden to leave the French territory, he was able to return home in Dubai, for a few weeks last March.
Born in Russia, the 40 -year -old libertarian self -proclaimed left his country of origin in April 2014, after refusing to collaborate with the Russian security agency on Vkontakte. He created this social network, nicknamed the “Russian Facebook” in 2006.
Declaring as an opponent of Vladimir Putin, he refused to block five communities on his platform at the request of the Kremlin authorities in 2011, after disputes of the latest legislative elections. A refusal that has given rise to investigations and searches of the authorities.
A man with multiple nationalities
The conflict with Russia has spread to the telegram, which was prohibited in the country from 2018 to 2020, after Pavel Durov refused to help Kremlin access to user data. After having fled the country, the billionaire obtained the citizenship of the Caribbean state of Saint-Christophe-Et-Nièves in 2013. Living in Dubai since 2017, also acquired the Emirati nationality in 2021. The same year, French was also naturalized even if it does not reside and has no relatives with France.
Pavel Durov, whose name was French in Paul Du Rove on request in May 2022, obtained French nationality thanks to the exceptional procedure known as “emeritus abroad”, as indicated by the world in an investigation. This grants French nationality to “a French -speaking foreigner who contributes for his emeritus action to the influence of France and the prosperity of his international economic relations” at the initiative of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (which has never confirmed information in this case).
Keep in mind that this is not the first time that Pavel Durov criticized France. Last April, he threatened to withdraw the telegram from the country after the statements of the Prefect of the Paris Police, which demanded hidden access, a stolen door, of the messages. “Telegram prefers to leave a market instead of undermining encryption with stolen doors and violating basic human rights,” he wrote in X.
If a stolen door allowed the police to better understand the actions of criminals, the Telegram CEO believes that this would largely weaken the entire application because “it is technically impossible to guarantee access through a robbed door only to the police.” In other words, it could be exploited by malicious people.
Source: BFM TV
