Irina Bolgar contends that she should be considered a partial owner of the messaging platform despite never being married to its CEO
A woman who claims to be the mother of three of Pavel Durov’s children has insisted that she is entitled to own part of Telegram despite never being married to the messaging platform’s billionaire CEO.
Irina Bolgar initially announced that the Russian-born entrepreneur is the father of her children in June and provided documents confirming his paternity to Forbes in August. The woman claims to have met Durov in 2012 and had three children with him between 2013 and 2017. She says she lived with her children in St Petersburg and moved to Dubai to be with Durov in 2018. However, since being denied a residence permit in the UAE in 2020, she has been living with her children in Switzerland.
Durov himself has not commented on the woman’s claims but has admitted that he became a sperm donor several years ago and has more than 100 biological children.
In a new post on Instagram on Wednesday, Bolgar claimed that although she and Durov were never officially married, Telegram should be considered their jointly-owned property.
The woman stated that while all “significant family assets” were registered in Durov’s name, she had access to them “through agreements and powers of attorney, which, while allowing their use, did not fully protect my rights and interests and, as it turned out, could be violated at any time.”