Telegram's Pavel Durov allowed to leave France for second time since his August 2024 detention: report

French authorities permitted Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov to leave France for the second time since his August 2024 detention, as he is under investigation for the alleged illicit activity on the messaging platform.

Durov can travel only to Dubai, where Telegram is headquartered, and only for 14 consecutive days starting on July 10, French newspaper Le Monde reported Thursday.

In March, French authorities allowed Durov to travel to Dubai for only a few weeks.

Aside from business matters, Durov has personal reasons to travel to Dubai.

"I have a son who was just born and I'm missing the first months of his life. He still doesn't have a passport, because I wasn't present at his birth in Dubai. I also have a teenage son who is in a boarding school in Dubai, who just broke his arm, and who has no parent by his side to support him," Durov told the conservative French newspaper Le Point. 

Agents of France's National Anti-Fraud Office arrested Durov on Aug. 24, 2024, related to a large-scale cybercrime investigation, alleging the Telegram CEO enabled illicit activities such as providing cryptography tools and services, spreading pornographic materials of minors, and money laundering, The Block previously reported.

Telegram is a secure messaging platform that supports the Layer 1 blockchain The Open Network ( TON ). The network's native token, Toncoin, traded at $2.93 as of writing and recorded $128.4 million in trading volume in the past day, The Block's TON Price Page shows. The token maintains a market capitalization of $7.2 billion.

Toncoin and TON saw rapid growth in the summer of 2024, largely due to blockchain-based mini apps, such as Hamster Kombat and Notcoin , within the messaging platform. The number of active TON addresses peaked at 1.44 million on Oct. 2, 2024, and now sits at 130,000 as of June 17, The Block's Data Dashboard shows.