Osborne, Hancock and other ministers did not declare secret Uber meetings

theguardian.com:

At least six Conservative ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber, leaked files reveal.

Uber lobbyists met the UK ministers between 2014 and 2016 as the controversial cab-hailing app was in the throes of fraught negotiations to win access to the lucrative British market.

A secret meeting with Osborne in California was also attended by senior executives at Google, and took place just months before he unveiled what turned out to be an utterly ineffective tax on tech companies.

The Uber files is a global investigation based on a trove of 124,000 documents that were leaked to the Guardian. 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 the law, duped police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world.

To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.

In a statement, Uber said: «We have not and will not make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.»

The disclosure will