Emmanuel Macron ‘proud’ of supporting Uber’s lobbying drive in France
Emmanuel Macron has said he was proud of supporting the US cab-hailing company Uber and would “do it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow”, after revelations of his efforts to help the American firm lobby against France’s closed-shop taxi industry.
Several French political figures from the left to the far right, as well as the leader of the leftwing CGT trade union, have called for a parliamentary inquiry into reports that Macron had secret undeclared meetings with Uber when he was economy minister from 2014 – 2016 and that he had told Uber he had brokered a “deal” with the bitterly divided Socialist cabinet then in power under François Hollande.
The revelations are contained in the Uber files – a cache of 124,000 company documents leaked to the Guardian and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
On the sidelines of an event to mark the building of a new semiconductor factory in Crolles, Macron was questioned by a journalist from Le Monde over having met Uber officials between 2014 and 2016.
“I was a minister and I did my job,” he said. “We’ve seen too much of a kind of atmosphere where meeting business heads, particularly when they are foreign, is seen as bad.” He said his meetings with business leaders were “always official” and included members of his staff.
He said: “I’m proud of it. If they have created jobs in France, I’m very proud of that, and you know what, I’d do it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.”
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
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