Wall Street Journal sources reported that Pavel Durov met with Emmanuel Macron in 2018.
Then Macron personally suggested to Durov to move Telegram headquarters to France. However, the entrepreneur refused this idea.
Durov himself chose the UAE for his headquarters because it is a “neutral territory” where there is no pressure from the authorities. However, the WSJ claims that the French and UAE intelligence services hacked Pavel Durov’s iPhone a year before the meeting with Macron during the “spy operation” Purple Music. The reason was the “acute alarm” of the French intelligence services, because they believed that Telegram was used by terrorists – The goal was to find out how the messenger works.
It is unknown what information the special services could have obtained. Whether Durov knew about this is also not reported. [WSJ]
Source: Iphones RU
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