Telegram founder Pavel Durov has accused French intelligence of asking him, through an intermediary, to censor certain Moldovan voices on the messaging app in exchange for help with his ongoing court case in France.
Durov, who is under judicial supervision in France following his 2024 arrest at a Paris airport, made the allegation on Sunday as Moldova held a parliamentary election that could shape the country’s European Union ambitions.
He claimed that French intelligence approached him while he was in Paris, asking him to take down several channels for the Moldovan government. While he said he removed some channels that violated Telegram’s rules, Durov described the offer as “unacceptable.”
“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,” Durov said.
The French foreign ministry dismissed his remarks, noting that Durov had made similar accusations about France interfering in Romanian politics earlier this year. At the time, France’s foreign intelligence agency, DGSE, denied his claims.
Durov, who founded Telegram after leaving Russia in 2014 for refusing to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte platform, has consistently denied wrongdoing. Telegram, with more than one billion monthly active users, is widely used across former Soviet states, including Russia and Ukraine.
