(MENAFN) Telegram’s co-founder Pavel Durov has proposed buying back the French crown jewels that were recently stolen from the Louvre.

The theft occurred on Sunday when four individuals entered the world-renowned Paris museum in broad daylight and escaped with eight royal artifacts, including a tiara, earrings, and necklaces once belonging to 19th-century nobility.

“Happy to buy the stolen jewelry and donate it back to the Louvre. I mean Louvre Abu Dhabi, of course; no one steals from Louvre Abu Dhabi,” the Dubai-based Russian entrepreneur posted on X on Tuesday.

Located on Saadiyat Island, the Louvre Abu Dhabi—launched in 2017—is a cultural collaboration between France and the United Arab Emirates.

Durov remarked that he was “not at all surprised” by the robbery in Paris. “It’s another sad sign of the decline of a once-great country, where the government has perfected the art of distracting people with phantom threats instead of confronting the real ones,” he wrote.

The Telegram founder has long criticized the French authorities for attempting to make him implement political censorship on the platform. In the previous year, he was briefly detained at a Paris airport for allegedly failing to remove unlawful material from Telegram and later released on bail.

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