Uber, the popular yet controversial ride-hailing company, reportedly aggressively wooed high-ranking government officials and politicians to ease its expansion across the globe, revealed a report by The Guardian.
The report was based on 18.7 gigabytes of leaked data comprising 1.24 lakh documents obtained by The Guardian, which then shared them with members of ICIJ, including The Indian Express.
The data leak covers five stormy years from 2013 to 2017, during which the cab aggregator faced a driver revolt and increased scrutiny from governments across the world.
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According to The Guardian report, the company lobbied to politicians such as US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The report suggests that Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick stopped at nothing when it came to expanding his company to cities across the world.
According to The Guardian, the leaks suggest that the circumvention of laws was no secret from company officials; on the contrary it was usually openly discussed. Nairi Hourdajian, Uber’s head of global communications, purportedly texted a colleague in 2014, saying, “Sometimes we have problems because, well, we’re just f****** illegal.”
Macron, who at the time was France’s economy minister, had gone to extreme lengths to maintain the company’s foothold in the country, especially in 2015 when a French police official seemed to ban one of Uber’s services in Marseille. Macron came to their aid with an “I will look at this personally” text to Uber’s chief lobbyist Mark MacGann.
Kalanic also had a meeting with Biden at the World Economic Forum at Davos. In a text message, Kalanick sent his colleague, he said, “I’ve had my people let him know that every minute he is late is one less minute he will have with me.” After the meeting, Biden, in his speech praised Uber as a company that would give millions of workers “freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish”.
Along with the Biden meeting at Davos, Uber executives also met Macron, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Osborne, who at the time seemed to be a “strong advocate”.
Osborne insisted that it was the government’s explicit policy at the time to meet with global tech firms and “persuade them to invest in Britain, and create jobs here”. While this one incident was declared, data suggests that six UK Tory cabinet ministers had meetings with Uber officials that were not disclosed.
The Guardian report also mentions that Uber enlisted the backing of powerful figures in places such as Russia, Italy, and Germany by offering them prized financial stakes in the then startup and turning them into “strategic investors”.
When Uber was launched in India, the workers here were asked to “embrace the chaos” because this chaos meant that they were doing something meaningful.
After receiving the files, The Guardian led a global investigation, sharing the data with media organisations around the world via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). “More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le Monde, Washington Post, the BBC and The Indian Express will in the coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the tech giant,” said The Guardian in its report.
In an official statement, Uber does not deny most of the reportage, instead expressing contrition. "We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come," the company said in the statement posted in its website.
First Published: Jul 11, 2022 4:26 PM IST
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