On July 10, local time, the British " Guardian " exclusively disclosed more than 100,000 internal confidential documents of the famous American online ride-hailing company " Uber ".
According to the "Guardian", these documents show how the leading companies in the online ride-hailing industry in the United States and even the world have gradually grown bigger around the world through a series of illegal methods, deceiving the police and colluding with politicians.
Leaders of major countries like U.S. President Biden and French President Macron have also been involved in Uber’s internal confidential documents exposed by The Guardian.
According to the "Guardian", these 124,000 internal confidential documents of Uber cover the company's emails, mobile phone text messages and chat records on the social software WhatsAPP involving 40 countries from 2013 to 2017.
(Screenshots from the Guardian report, the same below)
These documents show that when company founder Travis Kalanick (Travis Kalanick) led Uber, in order to compete with taxis for the market, the company directly encouraged French Uber drivers to take to the streets to organize tit-for-tat protests when French taxi drivers protested against the impact of the online ride-hailing industry on them, and even threatened that "violence can ensure success."
At the same time, in order to ensure that it can obtain the support of governments in multiple countries and successfully get these countries to modify their laws to allow Uber to develop, Uber, which has a large amount of financial support from venture capital companies, invested 90 million US dollars in public relations and government lobbying in 2016 alone, and the politicians and officials being lobbied are all mayors or heads of transportation departments who can directly make decisions.
Even more, Uber will use the relatives and friends of relevant officials to influence these officials to make decisions that are beneficial to Uber, and will give relevant personnel economic benefits, such as the company's stock , or simply turn them into "strategic investors."
These documents specifically mention that French President Macron provided a lot of support and help to Uber when he was the French Minister of Economy, and even told Uber that he had reached a "secret agreement" with the opposition party to support the development of Uber.
Uber executives have a cavalier attitude toward politicians who oppose the company. According to these documents, Uber’s top executives also had trouble with current German Chancellor Schulz, who was the mayor of Hamburg, Germany at the time. Schultz was insulted by an Uber executive as a "real comedian" because he demanded that Uber pay a minimum wage to ride-hailing drivers.
Although the current US President Biden, who was the Vice President of the United States at the time, supported the development of Uber, Uber's executives were also quite arrogant towards him at the time. Exposed documents show that once when Biden was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, he delayed a meeting with Uber founder Kalanick. As a result, Kalanick sent a message to a colleague saying that he would make Biden realize that "for every minute he is late, he will have one less minute with me."
In addition, according to the Guardian, these internal Uber confidential documents also show that in countries that regard online ride-hailing as an "illegal industry", Uber's executives still choose to operate in these countries even though they know that their business is illegal, and even have their IT department design a system to counter the law enforcement agencies of these countries in collecting evidence.
At present, Uber has responded to the more than 100,000 confidential documents containing the "dark history" of the company's fortune disclosed by the Guardian, saying that the problems exposed in these documents have been disclosed by the media many times before, and Uber has also fired many executives and replaced the CEO.
"We will not make excuses for past actions," Uber said.
column editor: Zhao Hanlu text editor: Song Yanlin title picture source: Visual China picture editor: Yong Kai
source: author: Global Times
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