Lobbying in excessive locations, concealing info, manipulating public opinion: that is the value Uber has paid to beat the world, as revealed by the Uber Information, an unlimited investigation by the Worldwide Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) involving 40 media companions, together with Le Monde, The Guardian and L’Espresso. Primarily based on greater than 124,000 confidential paperwork belonging to the American Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform obtained by The Guardian, the investigation sheds mild on the aggressive practices employed by Uber between 2013 and 2017 to determine itself in a number of elements of the world.
A number of worldwide political figures had been approached, with various levels of success, by the Californian agency, together with present German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (then Mayor of Hamburg), US President Joe Biden (Vice President on the time), and George Osborne when he was the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Uber appear to have discovered an ally in French President Emmanuel Macron when he was Minister of the Financial system. Macron is claimed to have met often with Uber representatives, along with aiding with its lobbying, in secret and in opposition to the opinion of his personal authorities. Former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes is claimed to have lobbied the Dutch authorities on behalf of Uber in the course of the interval following the tip of her mandate in Brussels, earlier than becoming a member of the corporate’s advisory board for a price of 200,000 euros.
The Uber Information additionally reveal that the corporate has exploited social actions and violence for publicity functions, and has a confirmed behavior of destroying confidential info, embodied by a “kill change” – a protocol for slicing off entry to firm knowledge within the occasion of a search.
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