A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov (aka Paul Du Rove, lead image lower right)) has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron (upper right) by their common friend, Xavier Niel (upper left), a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex business, including paedophilia, which also ended in a plea bargain with all charges dropped.
Durov issued his announcement of changes in Telegram’s terms of internet service and user privacy on September 23. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests. These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods.”
Durov claimed that Telegram’s search feature “has been abused by people who violated our terms of service to sell illegal goods. Over the past few weeks [his staff had used artificial intelligence to ensure that] all the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. We won’t let bad actors jeopardise the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”
Four days later on September 27 in an interview on a television channel owned by one of Niel’s business partners, he claimed the credit for supporting Durov after Durov had telephoned him for help. Niel had come to the rescue, he explained, because Durov was his “copain”. “First of all, for me he didn’t cross the line because he wasn’t convicted. What I know is that, once you have been in prison for having had legal problems, everyone disappears. Everyone disappears in this setting. Me, when I have a buddy [copain — chum, mate, pal, friend] who is in difficulty and who makes a phone call to me and well, here I am, here I am.”
Niel has not disclosed the extent of the behind-the-scenes discussions held with Macron, who has revealed his own special interest in the case after it was initiated, not by the French internet regulators or prosecutors, but by the foreign intelligence agency, Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE).
For the French political context which landed Durov in jail between August 24 and 28, begin here.
This is the official list of six criminal charges framed by the French prosecutors against Durov.
Source: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/
For the story of Durov’s assets, debts, operating losses, and financial manipulations; US stock fraud investigations of the Telegram group; and the military and political targets of French interest, read this.
Here is Niel’s interview in which he reveals Durov’s telephone call, Niel’s justification for helping him, and his cover-up of the French intelligence objectives achieved.
Source: https://www.bfmtv.com/. The television channel on which Niel made his announcement was recently bought by the French-Lebanese shipping oligarch, Rodolphe Saadé, an investment partner of Niel’s.
In his regular Antipresse publication, Slobodan Despot writes:
Between buddies. A slimy epilogue to the Parisian adventures of the Chevalier du Rove (see Antipresse 457 and Antipresse 458). The founder of Telegram has finally given in after being held in police custody. His platform will now provide information such as the IP address and telephone number of users suspected of criminal activity, if required by the courts. As we recall, he had refused the same service to his home country, but it is true that Russia did not have the idea of grilling him in prison.On the evening of his arrest, Pavel Durov had given priority to one person: Xavier Niel. The French oligarch has confessed to having come to the aid of his ‘buddy in trouble’. He may well have taught him how to climb above all those pesky prosecutors. Look at his own platform, Free, which may have hosted half the paedophile files on the net for years, with impunity. To do this, of course, it helps to become buddies with the President of the Republic. That’s what the Chevalier du Rove tried to do the other Saturday [August 24], before being arrested. Let’s bet that at the next dinner in town, Mr Macron won’t snub him again…
