NEW YORK, June 9. /TASS/. Pavel Durov, co-founder of the Telegram messenger, cannot understand what the French authorities accuse him of, he told American journalist Tucker Carlson in an interview.
"To be honest, I'm still confused. At first, they said, ‘Oh, you failed to respond to our legal requests, and that's why you're complicit.’ But first of all, we it's not true that we didn't respond to legally binding legal requests. And secondly, it's a very extensive interpretation of complicity, even for the French legal and judicial system. What I hear from my lawyers is that it's quite unprecedented," Durov said.
He said that earlier France persecuted "really small niche apps that are 10,000 smaller than Telegram and were targeted specifically at criminals. It's pretty much obvious that Telegram is not such a company, right? It has a billion users.
"In our case, they say that, all right, you created this app, and this app was used by other people, they were criminals, and you didn't do enough to prevent them from doing what they were doing. But the claim just conceptually doesn't make sense. I mean, if someone commits armed robbery in Burgundy or Toulouse or Nice, can President Macron be arrested for that because it's his country? He runs the country, and he didn't do enough to stop the armed robbery in Toulouse. Why isn't he in jail like that?"
Durov said that he was still staying in France, because he was restricted from leaving.
"Judicial control is when you can't leave the country freely because there is still investigation going on, and you're one of the suspects or the suspect. I was still being allowed to go to Dubai, and I returned last week from Dubai, and I will be going to Dubai later this week. But it's a very, very restricted, controlled process still," he said.
Last August Durov was detained in Paris on several charges, including complicity in the administration of a network platform to commit illegal transactions as part of a criminal group. Such an offense, according to the Paris prosecutor's office, can be punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 euros.
The investigating judge placed the businessman under judicial control with an obligation to pay a 5 million euro bail. He was also ordered to report to the police station twice a week and was forbidden to leave France.