According to reports, billionaire Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was released from police detention on Wednesday and assigned to an investigating judge.
According to the Wall Street Journal, his iPhone was hacked in 2017 as part of a joint operation between France and the United Arab Emirates.
Durov, who was arrested in France on Saturday for allegedly refusing to participate in cyber and financial crimes on Telegram, was released following a four-day French police interrogation, according to French news outlet Figaro and a Reuters judicial source.
READ MORE: Telegram CEO Arrested As Part Of Investigation Into Criminal Activity On The App
The investigative judge will now decide if there is enough evidence to launch a formal investigation into the Russian-born billionaire following his arrest as part of the messaging app’s organized crime probe. The ruling is due later Wednesday. Investigations can take years before being brought to trial or shelved.
Earlier Wednesday, a Wall Street Journal report citing people familiar with the matter claimed Durov’s phone was hacked in a spy operation code-named “Purple Music” in 2017, about a year before Durov met with French President Emmanuel Macron for lunch and discussed the Russian-born tech guru becoming a French citizen.
According to a source close to Macron, the lunch was one of several encounters the French leader had with tech entrepreneurs. Durov was awarded citizenship by both France and the UAE in 2021, and the Gulf government invested more than $75 million in his platform that year.
The operation, according to the article, was prompted by French security officials’ fears over Islamic State’s use of Telegram to recruit agents and plot operations.
A former French intelligence official from France’s General Directorate for Internal Security told the publication that compromising Telegram was a long-term effort by the country’s spy agencies, but he did not comment on the alleged hacking operation against Durov.
It is unclear how long his phone had been hijacked. According to Forbes, Durov founded the encrypted messaging application Telegram in 2013, which contributed to his net worth of over $15.5 billion.
The service is currently based in the UAE, where Durov lives, and has over 900 million monthly active users, according to its own stats. Durov also holds citizenship in the Caribbean island republic of Saint Kitts & Nevis.
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Some countries have criticized the app as they attempt to crack down on platforms that promote misinformation or critical information about governments. It has played an important role in distributing information about the Russia-Ukraine war, with officials on both sides utilizing its channels to broadcast their versions of the fight. To read information, users must first join individual channels and groups.
Durov was born in Soviet Leningrad, graduated from St. Petersburg State University, and left Russia in 2014 after defying official instructions to shut down opposition communities on his former social media platform, VK, which he later sold, according to Reuters.
He was arrested on Saturday at Le Bourget airport near Paris after apparently flying on a private plane from Azerbaijan, as part of a judicial investigation launched last month into 12 alleged criminal offenses, the Paris prosecutor’s office said Monday. His detention sparked an outcry from free speech activists, including fellow tech billionaire and X owner Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has accused the media and the Biden-Harris administration of repression.
Following the high-profile arrest, Macron claimed on Monday that the detention was “in no way a political decision.”
According to a statement issued by the Paris prosecutor’s office on Monday, the suspected violations include complicity in the sale of child pornography and drug trafficking, fraud, abetting organized crime transactions, and refusing to share information or documents with investigators when required by law. The prosecutor’s office did not specify the offense or crimes Durov may be suspected of.
According to Jean-Michel Bernigaud, secretary general of OFMIN, a French police body entrusted with preventing violence against kids, Durov’s detention was the result of the platform reportedly failing to adequately moderate content related to child sex offenses.
Despite Macron’s visit in 2018, French authorities have long viewed Telegram with mistrust and have taken a harsh approach to regulating internet platforms, weeding out what they see as antisemitic and racist content and combating illegal activity on their networks.
This year, the European Union enacted the Digital Services Act, which forces web companies to do more to police the internet for unlawful content. Companies can incur fines of up to 10% of their annual global turnover for DMA infractions and 6% for DSA offenses.
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