Telegram app logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 27, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
MOSCOW -Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of the Telegram messaging app, accused French intelligence on Sunday of asking him through an intermediary to censor some Moldovan voices ahead of a presidential vote last year in return for help with his court case in France.
Moldovans were voting in a parliamentary election on Sunday that could have a major impact on the government's quest to join the European Union, as a pro-Russian opposition group seeks to steer the nation away from closer ties with the bloc.
France did not immediately comment on the remarks by Durov, who was arrested in 2024 at a French airport.He is under judicial supervision in France while being investigated for suspected organised crime on the app.
Durovdenies guilt and has said the accusations by France are "legally and logically absurd".
Durov said on Sunday that while he was stuck in Paris, French intelligence used an intermediary, whom he did not name, to ask him to "censor" some Telegram channels for the Moldovan government.
Durov said "a few that clearly violated our rules" were removed and that the intermediary told him that in exchange for this, French intelligence would "say good things" about him to the judge who ordered his arrest.
"This was unacceptable on several levels," Durov said. "If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process."
"If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania."
FRANCE DENIED PAST ACCUSATIONS
Durov said in May that the head of France's foreign intelligence agency asked him to ban Romanian conservative voices ahead of the elections. France's DGSE, the foreign intelligence service, denied that at the time.
In Sunday's post on Telegram, Durov said French intelligence supplied "a second list of so-called 'problematic' Moldovan channels."
"Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules," Durov said. "Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments."
Telegram was founded by Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after he refused to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he has sold.
The encrypted application, with over 1 billion monthly active users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
Durov, who was born in Soviet Leningrad and graduated from St Petersburg State University, lists his political views as "libertarian" and says he was inspired by Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs.
(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
