A French parliamentary investigation into Uber has concluded there are “serious flaws” in France’s system of governing the gig economy, with “gaping loopholes” in rules around transparency still in place almost 10 years after the ride-hailing app established itself in Paris and beyond.
The six-month investigation, prompted by the Guardian’s Uber Files revelations last year and involving 67 hearings and testimony from 120 witnesses, found Uber benefited from a close relationship with Emmanuel Macron when he was the economy minister and the company was trying to establish its services.
“The intensity of the contacts between Uber, Emmanuel Macron and his cabinet testifies to an opaque but privileged relationship and reveals the inability of our system to measure and prevent the influence of private interests on public decision-making,” it concluded.
It found that Uber’s strategy “based on the deliberate violation of the law was coupled with aggressive lobbying to penetrate the heart of the French elite and exert influence in society in order to enhance Uber’s image and obtain the adaptation of its laws”.
Last summer, Macron said he would not change a thing about the approach he took to the US firm and said it was appropriate to facilitate the lifting of red tape.
Uber said it had “openly contributed to the committee’s investigation” and transformed “every aspect of how Uber operates in France” in recent years.
The report found that Macron was the subject of a “major manipulation operation” and Uber’s methods “elicited little reaction from the public authorities … despite the illicit nature of its activities”.
Foremost among Uber’s supporters was Macron, it said, who was willing to defend the company’s interests.
In evidence, the former prime minister Manuel Valls and the former interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said they resisted Uber’s lobbying to be allowed to gain entry to the market.
“Uber’s strategy was totally cynical. It consisted in aggressively and disruptively multiplying fronts to force the state to modify its regulations so that they became favourable to Uber’s interests, which was unacceptable,” Cazeneuve told the commission.
However, the inquiry pointed out, the law had not been enforced and Uber managed to launch its UberPop private driver service from early 2014 to 2015 when it was manifestly not legal.
Q&AWhat are the Uber files?Show
The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian by Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The data consist of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s most senior executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing papers and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber was aggressively expanding across the world. They reveal how the company broke…
2023-07-18 10:33:19
Post from www.theguardian.com
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