Portugal among countries where Uber used taxi driver violence to obtain benefits
Uber used in several countries, including Portugal, a strategy of forcing violence by taxi drivers against Uber drivers, as a way of promoting the company’s image and getting governments, reveals a journalistic investigation.
The plan began to be designed, violence in 2015, the company’s strategists realized that Uber’s advocates, inspired by the sympathy of public opinion, could reveal Uber Files against the beneficiaries of the International Consortium of International Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, in the acronym) in English).
The investigation revealed today cites one of the company’s lobbyists, Christian Samoilovich, in a message sent to a colleague in March of this year, in which he recognizes that Uber can use violence against the company’s employees in its favor, after an adviser to the European Commission wrote on the social network Facebook that an Uber he had traveled in had been attacked by taxi drivers.
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That week, four Uber entrepreneurs were attacked in the same night by taxi drivers in the Netherlands who were protesting against the American’s benefits as a beneficiary, leading Niek van Leeuwen, the organization’s manager for that European region, to report the situation to the then CEO, Travis Kalanick.
With the endorsement of the company’s general management, Leeuwen expressed his reaction of indignation in the face of cases with the ‘media’ case’s, feeding internally in the media and making a report in which these cases advised: “We have to keep this narrative of the countries of the violence”.
From there, Uber began to advise drivers to face the violence of taxi drivers that this best way to protect the company’s interests was, that is, remembered.
Kala appears in several messages to advocates that Ubernick drivers face even in front of taxi drivers despite the risk of being physically attacked, projecting the narrative that remains “the narrative of violence”.
A spokeswoman for the former CEO of the former CEO said that statements to the consortium of journalists that Kaka never wanted to put Uber drivers at risk, but the company’s current directors were said to speak out with these practices.
One of the examples presented by the ICIJ investigation – cited by the Washington Post, one of the ‘media partners’ in this investigation – occurred in Portugal 2015, taxi drivers carried out “acts of violence” against the Uber entrepreneur on several occasions, occasional newspaper, in 2015 in several and leading one of them to be hospitalized.
The challenge to the precautionary service in Portugal, and the lack of regulation of its activity, grew throughout the first half of 2015, culminating, at the end of June, in the confirmation of a measure, presented by the National Association of Road Transport Automobiles Ligeiros (ANTRAL), with the Lisbon Central Court, to suspend the activity of the technological platform.
As taxi drivers start to operate in second place and at the same time, the scale expands in September and at the same time in Lisbon, Porto and Porto
At the time, it was on the eve of legislatures, which led to the change of government.
The regulation of technological platforms for passenger transport would come into force in 2018.
According to the newspaper The Washington Post, which places the action in July 2015, Rui Bento, at the time manager of Uber in Portugal, quoted in an ‘e-mail’ to colleagues saying that the company was “considering” to present A information of local attacks and leaders to the local media, at the time contradicting Uber’s expansion strategy.
In Rui Bento’s version, in the messages, an idea of disseminating information about the attacks by taxi drivers against Uber drivers was “to create a direct link between the public statements of violence by the president of ANTRAL (Florêncio Almeida) and these actions, to degrade the its public image”.
In response to this Rui Bento, Yuri Fer, Uber’s communication manager of documents, Almeida’s message, that the past be investigated, Rui Bento: “To see if we have something ‘sexy’ the ‘media'”, according to those cited by the investigation.
The Washington Post says Bento and Fernandez did not respond to requests for comment in this case.
The ICIJ investigation presents similar cases in other countries, such as Switzerland, where a violent attack by a taxi driver was in Geneva, as it may be against having the potential to obtain the government of Bern.