Faced with a global scandal, it seems that the Uber. According to the evidence of a new massive investigation the company reached out to leaders, top officials, oligarchs and even media barons in order to advance the company’s interests.
The company Uber was yesterday Sunday at the center of one scandal following a massive investigation by journalists who accused her of previously “breaking the law” and using violent methods to impose herself on the market, despite the reservations of politicians and taxi companies.
“We have not justified and do not seek to justify behavior that is inconsistent with our current principles as a company,” Jill Hazelbaker, Uber’s vice president of marketing and public relations, said in a statement.
“We ask the public to judge us by what we have done in the last five years and by what we will do in the next,” he added.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper obtained from an anonymous img and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its 42 media partners some 124,000 documents dating from 2013 to 2017including SMS and emails from Uber executives as well as presentations, notes and invoices.
As the Athens News Agency reports, several media outlets around the world (including the Washington Post, Le Monde and the BBC) have published their first articles on the scandal based on the Uber Files.
In them they present some of Uber’s practices during the years of the company’s rapid expansion, but also during a period when it was at the center of many controversies, mainly with companies taxi in various cities, from Paris to Johannesburg.
“The company broke the law, misled the police and regulators, exploited violence against its drivers and secretly pressured governments around the world,” the Guardian article says in its introduction.
“Safety switch”
The articles mostly refer to messages from Travis Kalanick, then the head of the San Francisco-based company, when executives expressed concern about the risks Uber drivers who encouraged to participate in a demonstration in Paris might face.
“I think it’s very worth it,” the company’s co-founder replied. “Violence guarantees success.”
According to the Guardian, Uber adopted similar tactics in several European countries (Belgium, Holland, Spain, Italy…), mobilizing its drivers and prompting them to complain to the police when they were victimized attackswith the company aiming to take advantage of the media coverage to extract concessions from the authorities.
“Kalanick never implied that Uber was exploiting violence at the expense of driver safety,” Devon Spurgeon, a spokesman for the company’s former chief, responded in a statement released by ICIJ.
After accusations against him that he encouraged controversial and violent practices by the company’s leaders, against the background sexism and workplace harassment, Kalanick was forced to step down as CEO in June 2017.
When he announced his resignation from Uber’s board at the end of 2019, he said he was “proud of what the company has achieved”.
His representative yesterday rejected all the newspaper’s accusations, including that of obstruction of justice.
According to the papers, Uber had adopted various strategies to avoid attempts by law enforcement to intervene, including a “safety switch” that consisted of immediately cutting off an office’s access to Internet databases if research.
“Out of the law”
The Guardian cites various excerpts of conversations between executives in which they comment that there is no legal framework for Uber’s operations.
“Sometimes we get in trouble because we’re completely outside the law,” Uber communications director Nairi Khourdazian wrote to her colleagues in 2014, when the company’s existence was threatened in Thailand and India.
Uber initially had to fight to be accepted by consumers. The company flirted with consumers and drivers and found allies in power, such as Emmanuel Macron during his time as economy minister (2014-16), who is said to have subtly helped the company.
At the same time, Uber offered shares of political figures in Russia and Germany and paid researchers “hundreds of thousands of dollars to publish research on benefits of its economic model”, reports the British newspaper.
In its announcement yesterday, Uber recalls that the media had sufficiently covered them “mistakes” of the company before 2017.
“Today Uber (…) is an integral part of the daily lives of 100 million people,” Hazelbecker emphasized. “We have moved from an era of confrontation to an era of cooperation.”
Source: News Beast
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