The billionaire Russian-French founder of the Telegram messaging app has been arrested on his private jet at an airport on the outskirts of Paris but the French government claims no political motive was involved.
Pavel Durov, who was detained by police at Le Bourget airport on Saturday, was the subject of an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation, sources told TF-1.
It is thought the investigation was focused on an alleged lack of moderators on Telegram, and that French police considered that this enabled criminal activity to go on undeterred on the app.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the arrest of Mr Durov, who is based in Dubai and has dual UAE-French citizenship, was “in no way a political decision” and that his case would be determined by a judge.
“It’s the judicial system that will independently enforce the law,” Mr Macron said in a post on X.
A magistrates must decide by Wednesday evening whether to press charges, release him without charges or name him as a witness in the investigation.
Telegram has an estimated 900 million global users and is one of the most popular apps of its kind in the world.
Together with his brother Nikolai, Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013. He left Russia a year later, after refusing to comply with Russian government demands that he shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform.
In an interview with the American journalist Tucker Carlson this year, Mr Durov said he would “rather be free than to take orders from anyone”. Following his departure from Russia, Mr Durov, whose fortune has been estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, searched for a base for his company for some time, spending stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
Ukraine war
The Telegram platform has been extensively used by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his officials, as well as the Russian government, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
It became one of the few places where Russians and Ukrainians could access independent news about the conflict, after clampdowns on independent media following that outbreak of the war.
In 2018, Russia began blocking Telegram when the company refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to its users' encrypted messages.
Mr Durov has said in the past that certain governments had sought to pressure him but that Telegram should remain a neutral platform and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Nonetheless, as the app has became increasingly popular it attracted greater levels of scrutiny from officials concerned with security issues in several countries in Europe, including France.
No Shame
Lily Allen
(Parlophone)
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Miss Granny
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(Tagalog with Eng/Ar subtitles)
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Our legal columnist
Name: Yousef Al Bahar
Advocate at Al Bahar & Associate Advocates and Legal Consultants, established in 1994
Education: Mr Al Bahar was born in 1979 and graduated in 2008 from the Judicial Institute. He took after his father, who was one of the first Emirati lawyers
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9.25pm: Handicap (TB) $175,000 (D) 1,900m
10pm: Handicap (TB) $135,000 (T) 1,600m
