Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.
This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment, deception and fraud is unaccountably large. This is the reason Durov has failed to secure the US regulator’s permission to sell shares in his $30 billion valuation of Telegram in a US initial public offering (IPO). In short, the freedom and privacy Durov claims his Telegram social media platform represents is not at all what the financial reports reveal of his money-making.
The first fraud flag was waved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2019 after more than a year of Durov’s money-raising through digital tokens he called Grams which he offered to sell for $1.5 billion. At the time, cornerstone investors in Durov included the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other oligarchs.
Durov — announced the SEC — “seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public… the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”
In the five years since then, Durov claims to have sold another billion-dollar bond in 2021; $210 million in fresh securities in 2023; and $330 million in paper which Durov floated in March of this year. “The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization”, he said (telegrammed) at the time.
These investments weren’t exactly money for value, or vice versa. Durov has admitted he has been buying about a quarter of the debt issues himself. “Valuations are based on market inputs that are not observable,” reported a blockchain industry analyst.
When the investors have turned out to be governments – like Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi emirate wealth fund — the real value Durov promised to exchange is likely to be as much political and military as financial. Similar terms of exchange are likely to have been agreed when, in addition to his Russian passport in the name of Durov, he took passports from the United Arab Emirates (name unknown), France (name Paul du Rove), and St Kitts and Nevis.
Four months ago, Durov signed financial reports for his Telegram group prepared and audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC). He thought the details would remain secret. Instead, following his arrest and indictment in France last week, they were leaked to the Financial Times in London. The newspaper claims it “got its hands on the privately held company’s financials” but without explanation it is withholding them from full release. Durov’s signature is dated April 26, 2024.
In public defence of his countryman, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that Durov had been naïve about the “old system of globalization…P.V. Durov turned out to be too, too free, too slow or did not listen to Western advice about the so-called moderation of his brainchild.”
Naivety is not what Durov signed his name to in Telegram’s financial reports.
They reveal he is running a debt pyramid, replenishing the annual deficit between his expenditures and his income with new borrowings whose cost of servicing amounted in 2023 to 46% of his revenues. The leaked papers also disclose that his losses last year came to $259.3 million, although Durov managed to reduce that to $173.2 million by claiming offsetting digital assets had jumped in value. To support such valuation manipulations and his public claims of Telegram’s $30 billion market value, the small print of the auditor’s notes reveal that Durov uses his own digital money to boost the appearance of rising Telegram subscription numbers and demand for the company’s bonds — 15,000 subs and $64 million in bonds, to be precise.
As for protecting Telegram user privacy, Durov acknowledges that after subtracting $130 million in self-accounting “integrated wallet” value from his bottom-line revenue of $342.5 million, over the past year he sold “collectibles” for $17.8 million – almost 9%. This item is defined in the report as “usernames, virtual phone numbers…The related revenue is recognised at a point in time when the collectible is assigned to the user. The Group also enables the sale of collectibles between users and receives the fee for facilitating the sale.”
According to the public indictment of the French prosecutors, fraud is one of the charges against Durov, along with money laundering, concealment by cryptology, and “refusal to communicate, at the request of the authorized authorities, the information or documents necessary for the realization and exploitation of interceptions authorized by law.”
According to Russian and international sources, the recent history of each one of these charges involves Durov in dealings with the Azerbaijan government, with the Kanak rebellion in the French colony of New Caledonia, and in undertakings he gave to agents of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), when they visited him recently in Dubai.
For a legal analysis of the Digital Services Act and regulations, the law applying to Telegram and to free speech in the social media in the European Union (EU), read this from Craig Murray. The analysis is made irrelevant by Murray’s acknowledgement that the indictment may be warranted if Durov “refused to remove or act over specific individual content specified by the French authorities, or unless he set up Telegram with the specific intent of facilitating organised crime”.
Specific content was what the DGSE told Durov it wanted him to provide when they last met. That they met has been confirmed by the official leaks in Libération’s report of September 1. The newspaper headline was “The man who was hiding too much”. That Durov reneged on his promise to the DGSE is what the Paris prosecutor’s statement of August 28 indicates.
Source: https://cloud.mail.ru/
Sources in Baku, Azerbaijan, and in Moscow believe the French agents were pressing Durov to reveal identities and a great many other details of the Kanak rebellion in New Caledonia who have been using Telegram, as well as their sources of outside financial and other support. Russian and Azeri sources believe there is a Telegram trail of support between New Caledonia and the Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia and its French government backers.
A Baku source adds that Durov is not as rich as he wants the world to think, and that he has been seeking, and getting, investments from sources close to the ruling Aliyev family in Baku, especially Leyla Aliyeva. When Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport in Paris, he had just flown from Baku. “I doubt very much,” the source adds, “that Durov was there [Baku] for meeting a member of the family or even Leyla.” Leyla Aliyeva is the senior daughter of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.
A Russian source adds: “We can conclude he was not there to meet Leyla, and thus no person from the Aliyev family, and so no meeting with [President Vladimir] Putin was on the cards.” Putin was in Baku to meet President Ilham Aliyev between August 18 and 20. Durov was in Baku after Putin had left; Durov then flew from Baku to Paris on August 24.
A Russian source believes that the former Russian, now US-based internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, (right) who bought Durov and his partners out of VKontakte in 2014 for a total of $2.1 billion, has been hostile towards Durov’s Telegram IPO plans in the US. The source comments speculatively. “The Yuri Milner story is also clouded. Durov’s IPO never happened because Milner would have first-hand knowledge that this guy was toxic.”
In May, Durov invited Tucker Carlson to his living-room in Dubai for an hour-long interview. Russian sources interpret the text in reverse – to Carlson Durov misrepresented his efforts to launch an IPO in the US and his contacts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Durov also made a telling slip of the tongue, one of the Russians notes. When Durov compared the “efficiency” of his management team at Telegram “like a Navy SEAL team” (Minute 39), he was trying to show how closely he was willing to cooperate with the Americans if they paid his price in share sales. “The naivety on display came from Carlson”, the source added.
“I think it makes sense to stay prudent… not travelling to weird places,” Durov told Carlson. “I travel to places where I have, ah, confidence that, you know, are consistent with what we do and our values. I don’t go to any of the big geopolitical powers, countries like China or Russia or the US…” (Min 45:20-45:53) Not once did Durov say he understands that the world is at war with Russia. The word war was not spoken in the 58 minutes of interview.
That in the propaganda war of the US and NATO allies against Russia, freedom of speech cannot be exercised on either side has been turned by Mikhail Zygar, a Russian oppositionist now in Berlin, into a defence of Durov’s money-making mythology.
According to Zygar, “a few years ago, [Durov] posted semi-nude photos of himself on Instagram, taken in the desert, evoking the unmistakable aesthetic of ‘Prince of Persia.’ Pavel saw himself as a mysterious prince, misunderstood and sought after by everyone. And soon, he said, thanks to his new crypto platform TON, he would become the richest person in the world…Durov always dressed in black: a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers. Even when he went for a walk, a car would follow him, carrying spare T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers—just in case his clothes got dirty and he needed to change. Over the past ten years, Pavel Durov has become a real idol for countless young Russians. A mystical hero who made himself, amassed a colossal fortune, built several tech businesses from scratch, and never bowed to government pressure—an ideal hero for many young Russians.”
“Durov never criticized Putin, but even the fact that he left Russia was a clear sign that he was against the regime…The arrest of Pavel Durov in France is a major moral blow for his followers. Russian propaganda is trying to turn this to its advantage. As usual, it broadcasts the message that everywhere is the same, and the rules in Europe are no different from those in Russia. There is no freedom of speech or fair trial anywhere—so if there’s no difference, why leave Russia? Here, at least, everything is familiar and our own. Over the past two years, this has become the most effective thesis of Russian propaganda within the country:”
“My number-1 priority in life is my freedom. Once you start buying things, first it will tie you down to a physical location…and the second reason is that I like to stay focused on what we do with Telegram…I’m an optimist… I do believe the world develops in cycles and that if things seem to go in one direction today doesn’t mean that tomorrow they will go in the same direction…things are starting to change, it seems…What X is trying to do, in line with what we are building, is innovation, you know, trying different things, trying to give power to the creators, trying to get the ecosystem economy going, those are all exciting things. And we need more companies like that.” Source: https://tuckercarlson.com
This week, in referring to Durov, Foreign Minister Lavrov repudiated everything Durov told Carlson’s American audience he stands for. “The globalization that the West has been actively promoting for many years has been adopted as a method of doing business between states in the field of economy, technology and finance. This model of globalization is now falling apart. The principles on which it was based, according to the beliefs of our Western colleagues – fair competition, inviolability of property, presumption of innocence, market forces – all this was thrown away by the West at one point in order to punish in this case the Russian Federation.”
THE DUROV GROUP
Left, Father, Professor Valery Durov, Latin and Roman literature academic at the St. Petersburg State University. Right, older brother, Dr Nikolai Durov, mathematics prodigy, currently in St Petersburg — source: https://www.bbc.com/ Listen to Durov lecturing in English on mathematics.
Pavel Durov’s partner, Yulia Vavilova: https://www.instagram.com/
Cribbing from Russian social media and gossip sites, the London tabloid press has been amplifying Vavilova’s photo advertising of herself, and adding unsubstantiated allegations of her involvement with western intelligence agencies, including Israel.
Durov’s arrest, and the interest the French authorities have declared in obtaining the encryption keys to the Telegram operations, have accelerated the debate in Russia over the operational security of the Telegram app when it is used informally by Russian troops, in the reports published by Russian war correspondents in the combat zone and the military bloggers, as well as in more formal, operational uses by military organizations.
“Fierce disputes about the importance of the [Telegram] service for the army in Russia have already been conducted,” reports the oppositionist platform Meduza in Riga, “most recently, in July, when the State Duma passed a law on the appointment of a guardhouse for military personnel using ‘civilian’ gadgets. Then, under the pressure of criticism from ‘military commanders’ and pro-military bloggers — they feared that the ban would deprive the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation of high-quality communications — the rule was relaxed…In fact, Telegram is actively used by the military, especially at the tactical level and in the rear. In this capacity, the message platform won a competition from Whatsapp at the beginning of the full-scale war, mainly due to rumours about the lack of security of the latter: the opinion quickly spread at the front that the US intelligence service has access to all chats on the platform owned by American Meta, which in turn shares data with Ukraine.”
Nikolai Kononov, author of a book entitled Код Дурова (Durov’s Code), was asked last week how he explains that Telegram appears to have responded more willingly to Russian government requests than to those of foreign governments. “Because for Pavel Durov,” Kononov replied, “the Russian market is especially important, because the company is from this country of origin. Secondly, because, of course, he is manoeuvering all the time. Pavel Durov constantly plays cat and mouse. One step forward, two back: he does not give out information on such-and-so, but he goes out of his way to block the Navalny group by formal signs. In fact, the same cat-and-mouse games occur with other countries. Maybe there are less of them. We do not know this, because we are focused on the Russian agenda — for us the story with Navalny’s team is loud and clear. And, let’s say, it’s the same story with the blocking of Telegram in Iran because Iran is categorically against Telegram — they even released such a statement. For us, that world is a little different, a quite different reality, so we know less about it.”
Asked about Durov’s last exit from Russia, “I think”, said Kononov (right), “that in the first years after 2014, when he left Russia, he traveled back simply because of family, property, and so on– his connections. Why he traveled [back to Russia] from the moment when the Russian authorities began to make claims against Telegram is a real question. I don’t have an answer to it. It is symptomatic that since the autumn of 2021, Durov has stopped traveling to Russia altogether. In my opinion, this is a sign that either he has super-developed instincts or, more likely, he received a sign from the authorities that a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine would begin, and he decided that he did not want to get himself dirty in this, so he finally broke with Russia.”
Speaking for the Alexei Navalny group in exile abroad, Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s ex-chief of staff, has announced his support for Durov’s brother Nikolai, who is also the target of a French arrest warrant. “Hands off Kolya [Nikolai] Durov, what are you doing at all. He is a genius, a real one, not a criminal”, the BBC Russian service has reported Volkopv as saying.
On his own Telegram outlet, Volkov wrote on August 25: “The history of Telegram is a history of complex compromises and, often, very opaque censorship decisions (the [Navalny] Smart Voting bot sends greetings!), it is ridiculous and incorrect to consider Telegram a ray of freedom and a light of the uncensored Internet; Durov has been engaged in realpolitik for many years with varying success. The censorship requirements of the European countries are complex, not always clear, and many of them can and should be argued with; too often, legislators’ attempts to regulate the Internet lag behind the technological reality and the changing world. At the same time, law enforcement agencies often abuse the opportunities to prosecute those who work in the ‘gray zone’, interpreting the law literally and formalistically.”
“Telegram really has become a platform that is actively used by all kinds of crime, and opaque, weak policies for filtering illegal content have greatly stimulated this. It is completely unclear why the crimes of third parties on the site (financial, communication, whatever) should entail criminal prosecution against the creator of the site; in fact, there are fines, courts, licensing restrictions for this – for example, if a bank’s policies are not strict enough and someone launders money through the bank, then he is fined, then his license is revoked, but the owners are not imprisoned…How I envy (actually not) everyone who knows how to reduce this multidimensional, complex picture to one simple thesis (no matter what!). It seems to me that the detention of Durov by the French authorities is politically and humanly wrong. Durov is not an ‘accomplice’ to crimes committed by Telegram users. He must be released. And I think he will be. I think that the French authorities and the leadership of Telegram will reach (or have already reached) some kind of agreement on changing content-filtering policies, and this is just fine. It’s bad that such cinematic moves like airport detention are used.”
