Transcript of 18-hour deposition of Telegram CEO Published Online

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov gave an 18 hour deposition to the SEC concerning the $1.7 billion Gram sale which allegedly violated the United States securities law.

The deposition took place on January 7 and 8 before the court reporter assigned by the court reporting service engaged by the plaintiff — the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

SEC continues its attempts to get information on $1.7 billion

The official transcript document shows that the deposition was conducted in Dubai with Telegram lawyer Alexander Drylewski and SEC official Jorge Tenreiro involved. The deposition started on January 7 at 11:21 AM and lasted till 10:00 PM. On January 8 it lasted from 10:23 AM till 06:09 PM, local time.

The deposition was videotaped, and the transcript fragmented, with some fragments being deleted to ensure confidentiality.

During the deposition, which took 18 hours including breaks, the SEC grilled Telegram as to their expenses and funds used to set up the company. Answering one of the questions, Pavel Durov stated, that the firm plans to continue spending funds similarly to the 2019 budgets:

“My expectation is that we will continue to spend funds in a manner similar to which took place last year or this year — or, yeah, last year and the beginning of this year. So we don’t anticipate big changes up until the launch of TON when we expect that certain expenses might go down due to the fact that we will no longer be spending resources on developing and testing TON.”

Telegram will give some Grams to its developers

Tenreiro also asked about the amount of Grams which will be held by the company’s employees after the launch. In response Durov stated that upon Telegram Open Network (TON) launch Telegram will not hold any tokens. Telegram CEO also added that 4% of Grams will be given to the employees, and the exact figures are still being evaluated:

“I can reconfirm that Telegram will not hold any Grams post launch. We mentioned in the offering materials that we plan to distribute 4 percent of Grams, which should be around 200 million Grams, I believe, among the development team, and we are still evaluating, under the circumstances, whether we would proceed with that initial plan of distributing all or some of those 200 million Grams among the developers that worked on TON.”

The SEC asked about the incentives for employees as well in an attempt to clarify Telegram’s smart contract contest announced in September 2017. Telegram’s CEO answered that the program is still running, and individuals are accepted and rewarded within it.

Between 2013 and 2018 Durov funded Telegram using funds from sale of Vkontakte



The transcript provided by Russian publisher The Bell shows that from 2013 to 2018 Durov funded Telegram with money he acquired after selling Vkontakte (VK) in 2014

In addition, Durov noted that the amount of employees didn’t change significantly since 2017, comprising 25 employees who ”write programming code”. The company has also involved “hundreds of independent contractors”, Telegram CEO said.

According to the last reports, Telegram will hand over its redacted bank records to the court until February 26. Despite the battle heating up, some developers continued to work on TON block explorers.