Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s criminal case in France reportedly won’t go to trial for a year or more. Maylis de Roeck, a spokesperson for the French prosecutor’s office, told WIRED that it’s still too early to discuss “any kind of settlement agreement,” more than five months since Durov’s arrest in Paris. “For now,” WIRED writes, “Durov is stuck in France, and his company seems to be in a kind of limbo, waiting to find out if a leader who has positioned himself as irreplaceable will need to be replaced.”
De Roeck told WIRED that officials decided to act against the Telegram founder after realizing that the social network’s noncompliance with police requests had "stymied” 2,460 cases between 2013 and 2024 across different departments. Before Durov’s arrest in August 2024, French prosecutors had been investigating him for months over his and Telegram’s alleged failure to block illegal activity, which France claims included fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), organized crime, and terrorism.
Yulia Conley, who worked as Telegram’s first official head of external and government relations, told WIRED that Telegram’s “scarcity of human capital in this very important domain of content moderation could be the main reason why the current escalation had occurred.”
Durov was released on bail for 5 million euros ($5.2 million) a few days after his arrest. He remains in Paris and must report to the police regularly. In December 2024, he told the French authorities that Telegram has actively cooperated with law enforcement, providing state officials around the world with data on some 10,000 users.
