Uber Files: Leak reveals how Uber 'lobbied leaders and duped police' to grab new markets

euronews.com:

As Uber aggressively pushed into markets around the world, the ride-hailing service lobbied top political leaders including France's Emmanuel Macron to relax labour and taxi laws, according to a global media investigation into thousands of leaked files.

The report also reveals the company used a “kill switch'' to thwart regulators and law enforcement, channelled money through Bermuda and other tax havens and considered portraying violence against its drivers as a way to gain public sympathy.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a non-profit network of investigative reporters, scoured internal Uber texts, emails, invoices and other documents to deliver what it called “an unprecedented look into the ways Uber defied taxi laws and upended workers' rights".

Dubbed the Uber Files, the leak consists of over 124,000 documents spanning the period between 2013 and 2017.

The documents were first leaked to the British newspaper The Guardian, which shared them with the consortium.

They showed Macron went to "extraordinary lengths" to support Uber’s efforts to disrupt France’s closed-shop taxi industry when he was economy minister, according to the Guardian, which cited text message exchanges between Macron and Uber executives.

In a statement to the newspaper, the French presidential palace said Macron’s ministerial duties at the time “naturally led him to meet and interact with many companies engaged in the sharp shift which came out during those years in the service sector”.

In a written statement. Uber spokesperson Jill Hazelbaker acknowledged “mistakes'' in the past and said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, hired in 2017, had been “tasked with transforming every aspect of how Uber operates".

"When we say Uber is a different