Is £12bn encrypted app boss in French cell because girlfriend revealed their location on Instagram?

Pavel Durov was home alone when the heavies came calling one day in 2011. The techie known as ‘Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg’ had refused to remove opposition politicians’ accounts from his social media site VKontakte and the Kremlin had lost patience.

The monitor that allowed him to screen visitors before opening the door of his St Petersburg apartment showed a group of men in camouflage gear accompanied by what looked like a civilian investigator.

‘They had guns and they looked very serious,’ Durov, 39, recalled later. ‘They seemed to want to break the door.’ 

He decided the best course of action was to ignore them and, after an hour or so, they gave up and left. But during the stand-off with the SWAT team, Durov called his brother and it was then that he had his lightbulb moment.

Pavel Durov was arrested at Paris’s Le Bourget airport on Saturday evening after flying in from Azerbaijan by police

‘I realised I don’t have a safe means of communications with him,’ he said. ‘That’s how Telegram started.’

Today, Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform similar to WhatsApp, has more than 950million users and has made Durov a fortune estimated at £12billion.

But it is his success in creating an app that allows users to communicate confidentially that has proved his undoing.

Disembarking from his private jet at Paris’s Le Bourget airport on Saturday evening after flying in from Azerbaijan, Durov was arrested by police enforcing a warrant that accused him of failing to moderate illegal content and cooperate with law enforcement agencies over investigations into drug trafficking, child pornography and fraud.

His arrest sparked howls of outrage from free speech warriors such as Elon Musk, the multibillionaire owner of X/Twitter, who tweeted the hashtag ‘#FreePavel’ alongside a short clip of Durov speaking with Right-wing US commentator Tucker Carlson.

It also became the subject of feverish speculation after it emerged that nothing had been heard from Julia Vavilova, a social media influencer believed to be Durov’s girlfriend, since he was taken into custody. Like Durov, the 24-year-old Russian blonde is based in Dubai, and she had been accompanying him on a whirlwind tour of former Soviet republics, including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Azerbaijan.

Indeed, some observers reckon it was her posts on sites such as Instagram – complete with geolocation data – that alerted the French authorities to his movements and enabled them to be waiting when he touched down.

This has led conspiracy theorists to speculate that Vavilova is a Mossad agent, on a honey-trap mission to deliver him into the hands of Western intelligence agencies.

After all, gaining back-door access to the Telegram app would enable them to extract information that could prove invaluable in tracking down miscreants from terrorists to money-launderers.

Durov’s love life has been a subject of intense interest ever since he recently claimed on his personal Telegram channel that he had fathered more than 100 children via sperm donation in 12 nations since 2010.

He is also believed to be the father of five other children conceived naturally: a daughter and son with ex-partner Daria Bondarenko, who is now based in Barcelona, and a daughter and two sons with Irina Bolgar, 44, a Russian based in Switzerland.

Durov, a teetotal vegetarian who won’t touch recreational drugs, fast food or even caffeine, is also said to undertake six-day, water-only fasts to improve his creativity. And he has built up quite a following online by posting pictures of himself bare-chested that reveal a sculptured physique.

His ascetic lifestyle is matched by a self-professed aversion to the accumulation of personal possessions.

‘In my days in Russia, I visited some very rich guys,’ he said in 2014. ‘I visited big ships, private airplanes, houses and I know for sure I don’t want this for myself.’

Home is a 15,000 sq ft, five-bedroom villa in Dubai, but he doesn’t own it, instead renting it for $1million a year.

For the moment, however, he must reconcile himself to the rather less salubrious surroundings of a French detention centre, as the police – having held him for the statutory 24 hours – successfully applied to hold him for a further 72 hours, a period that will run out tonight.

If Durov is convicted of 12 charges against him, he could face up to 20 years in prison.

It represents quite a reversal of fortune for a man who was marked for great things in childhood.

Durov was introduced to computer programming by his older brother Nikolai, a budding mathematician.

By 11, he was coding his own versions of games like Tetris, the hugely successful video game. When a classmate who had studied in the US showed him Facebook, he got the idea of creating a Russian social network. VKontakte, or ‘VK’, was born in 2006.

The personable Pavel, then just 21, took on the role of chief executive, while Nikolai took responsibility for coding.

By May 2012, things were going so well that they were in a position to reward one vice president of the company with a substantial cash bonus.

‘We began to congratulate him: “You’re a rich guy now,”’ Durov said. But the recipient of his largesse turned out to be as unmaterialistic as Durov claims to be.

‘I don’t work for money,’ he insisted. ‘Money is completely not important to me. The idea is what’s important to me.’

When Durov suggested his vice president throw the money away, the man started tossing cash out of the upstairs window of their St Petersburg office onto the city’s main thoroughfare.

‘Don’t throw your money from the window like that,’ protested Durov. ‘You have to do it in a creative way.’

And with that, he demonstrated how to fold the 5,000 rouble notes (then worth around £102 each) into tiny paper planes. As the folded notes spiralled down onto the busy street below, passers-by reacted first with stupefaction and then desperate greed. Fights broke out, with one witness observing that people began behaving like ‘animals’.

Realising that things were getting out of hand, Durov and co called a halt to their informal philanthropy – but not before more than £3,000 had been distributed.

The incident had a lasting significance because, when Durov launched Telegram a year later, he chose as its logo a paper plane because it symbolised freedom.

The storm clouds of repression were gathering, however. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had long viewed the internet as a ‘CIA project’, that acted as a channel for illicit agitation and protest. And nothing was more calculated to incur his wrath than Durov’s Russian version of Facebook.

And so Moscow’s successor to the KGB, the FSB, made plans to acquire it via an email service called Mail.ru that was controlled by tame oligarchs. Unfortunately for them, Durov still hadn’t got the message and posted a picture of himself extending his middle finger, a gesture he described as his official response to the Kremlin-backed bid.

However, four months after eventually selling his stake in VK in December 2013, Durov submitted his resignation to the board.

True to his mischievous persona, Durov chose April Fool’s Day to announce his departure, signing off with a quote from science fiction comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: ‘So Long and Thanks for All the Fish.’

Even the company’s own spokesman initially refused to confirm the chief executive’s resignation, writing on Twitter that the ‘press service is not commenting on the words of the chief executive’.

A link posted on Twitter to ‘the official press statement’ sent anyone who clicked on it to the famous ‘Rickrolling’ internet meme, a video of British pop star Rick Astley singing his 1980s classic Never Gonna Give You Up. Durov later said his resignation had been a ‘joke’ but, in the end, there was only ever going to be one winner.

When he refused to block the page of celebrated Russian dissident Alexei Navalny – who died in mysterious circumstances earlier this year – and declined to hand over the personal data of Ukrainian protesters involved in the 2014 demonstrations against pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, he was dismissed.

Durov left Russia, announcing that he had ‘no plans to go back’ and that ‘the country is incompatible with internet business at the moment’.

But he did have a few hundred million dollars in his pocket and, in the months that followed, he lived a nomadic existence, moving from country to country every few weeks with a small group of fellow programmers.

One day, the Telegram founder – in his distinctive all-black wardrobe – would be found in Paris or London, then perhaps San Francisco or Singapore. In time, he set up Telegram’s headquarters in Berlin, before moving it to its current base in Dubai in 2017.

There, without political battles to distract him, Durov turned Telegram into an internet behemoth. In countries run by repressive regimes, it became a lifeline for freedom-loving citizens, who were free to share their heresies online, safe in the knowledge that their communications were secure from prying eyes.

Thomas Brown