By Adedapo Adesanya
The President of the United States, Joe Biden and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron have been named in leaked confidential files that show that global mobility tech company, Uber, flouted laws, duped authorities, and secretly lobbied governments to drive its growth.
According to the Guardian, “more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.”
It was disclosed that the leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, using methods that breached laws and taxi regulations.
Unlike Mr Biden, Mr Macron was a focal point as it was revealed that there were texts between Mr Kalanick and Mr Macron, who secretly helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff.
The French president, according to the leaks, appeared to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber, even telling the company he had brokered a secret “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.
For an instance, during taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Mr Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.
The leaked emails suggest that such a strategy was repeated in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. For example, when masked men, reportedly angry taxi drivers, attacked Uber drivers with knuckle-dusters and a hammer in Amsterdam in March 2015, Uber used the violence to try to win concessions from the Dutch government.
The leak also showed that Uber executives expressed disdain for other elected officials who accepted and those who were sceptical of the company’s business model.
The leak revealed that when the then US vice-president, Mr Biden, a supporter of Uber at the time, was late to a meeting with the company at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Mr Kalanick texted a colleague: “I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me.”
After the German chancellor, Mr Olaf Scholz, who was mayor of Hamburg at the time, pushed back against Uber lobbyists and insisted on paying drivers a minimum wage, an executive told colleagues he was “a real comedian”.
In a statement responding to the leak, Uber admitted to “mistakes and missteps”, but said it had been transformed since 2017 under the leadership of its current chief executive, Mr Dara Khosrowshahi.
“We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values,” it said. “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 Guardian led the global investigation into the leaked Uber files, 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 France’s Le Monde, USA’s Washington Post and the BBC will in the coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the tech giant.
