Paris: A French judge put Telegram boss Pavel Durov under formal investigation on Wednesday in a probe into organised crime on the messaging app, but granted the entrepreneur bail on condition he pays 5 million euros, reports twice a week to police and does not leave French territory.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement that the judge found there were grounds to formally investigate Durov on all the charges he was initially arrested for.
They include suspected complicity in running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals.
Durov’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges consider there’s enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved.
The judge’s decision came four days after Russian-born Durov was arrested at an airport near Paris.
Durov’s detention has fuelled debate on where freedom of speech ends and enforcement of the law begins. It also underlines the uneasy relationship between governments and Telegram, which has close to 1 billion users, while serving as a warning shot to tech titans who refuse to comply with authorities over alleged illegality on their platforms.
Beccuau said Telegram had been used in various criminal cases, and that the “almost total lack of response from Telegram to judicial requisitions” eventually caught the attention of the Paris prosecutor’s office cybercrime unit.
“Other French investigation services and public prosecutors’ offices as well as various partners within Eurojust, in particular Belgian ones, shared the same observation,” about Telegram’s lack of compliance, Beccuau said.
That prompted the Paris prosecutor’s organized crime office to open a probe “into the possible criminal liability of the managers of this messaging service in the commission of these offences,” she said in her statement.
The probe began in February, with the investigations carried out by the National Office for Minors, with an introductory indictment in July, Beccuau said.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon, Elizabeth Pineau, Tassilo Hummel, Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Timothy Heritage, Sharon Singleton and Daniel Wallis)
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