After four days of detention, the 39-year-old billionaire Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the encrypted messaging platform Telegram, was brought before French justice today.

After being informed that he was officially under investigation for the Telegram platform’s rumored connection to organized crime, the judges decided to be released on parole, if he pays a guarantee of 5 million euros. Durov is also required to report to a police station twice a week and is banned from leaving France.

Also, the Franco-Russian billionaire is also the target of an investigation for exercise “of serious violence” to one of his children in Paris, as it became known yesterday Wednesday to AFP from a well-informed source. The acts were allegedly committed against a child of his who was born in 2017 and attended school in Paris. The little boy now lives in Switzerland with his mother. She filed a lawsuit in Switzerland in 2023, accusing her ex-partner of abusing one of his children, the same source added.

Pavel Durov – “the Russian Mark Zuckerberg”, as they call him – is a citizen of France and the United Arab Emirates. His fortune is estimated at 15.5 billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine. Last April he said that some governments had sought to put pressure on him, but argued that his platform should remain “neutral” and not serve “geopolitical games”.