Uber France Leaders Arrested For Running Illegal Taxi Company

An anonymous reader writes: Two Uber executives were arrested by French authorities for running an illegal taxi company and concealing illegal documents. This is not the first time Uber has run into trouble in France. Recently, taxi drivers started a nation-wide protest, blocking access to Roissy airport and the nation's interior minister issued a ban on UberPop. A statement from an Uber spokesperson to TechCrunch reads: "Our CEO for France and General Manager for Western Europe were invited to a police hearing this afternoon; following this interview, they were taken into custody. We are always available to answer all the questions on our service, and available to the authorities to solve any problem that could come up. Talks are in progress. In the meantime, we keep working in order to make sure that both our customers and drivers are safe following last week’s turmoils."

Comments

Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[MouseR]

In Quebec, it costs upwards of 200,000$ CDN to have a taxi license.

Drivers spent their entire life's saving enough to buy their own license while they lease another one's. It's their only retirement plan: lease a license they earned to buy.

No wonder they're pissed.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[chihowa]

WTF have your shares got to do with your desire to deliberately trash the life savings of millions of taxi drivers in the western world?. They entered into a contract with the government...

Typically, taxi medallions aren't sold by the government anymore. They're typically sold by their previous holders and the high prices reflect their scarcity and perceived value. The market decides this value (even when they're auctioned off by the state), so there isn't any guarantee that they'll maintain that value. Any contracts that exist say nothing about limiting the supply or compensating medallion-holders for any speculative prices they paid. Buying a medallion for $800k is just as speculative as buying an $800k house or $800k worth of stock. There are no government guarantees that they will maintain value.

tl;dr... The economics of the taxi medallion situation are extremely similar to shares in a company. The "contracts" that you're referring to don't exist (at least in the form that you image).

Re:Does Uber need executives in France?

[Uberbah]

Unions had their place. It's in history now, just like the confederate flag. Unions need to die, they do nothing any longer other than make a few wallets fat (the few running the unions), a TON of people lazy (nearly all union workers), and they disrupt commerce and blah blah blah blah blah

Unions will be needed as long as greedy executives try to exploit labor. Any more concern trolling?

Uber is illegal in France

[HuguesT]

Uber operates outside the bounds of the law in France. This is well documented. There are two sets of law that they do not obey. The first is one regulating car drivers that are not taxis. It is legal in France to operate a car service to drive people from A to B but you need to abide by some restrictions. The car cannot be hailed, only booked. The driver must have some qualification, etc. Uber does not abide by these laws. The second set of law protects the consumer. In particular, data must be viewable and deletable by the consumer, and they cannot be retained indefinitely. Again Uber does not follow the law.

Recently the french equivalent to state department pointed out to Uber that they needed to change some things, so what did they do? They opened service in 5 new cities with no change. This was seen as provocation, and so obviously the top executives were brought in for questioning. The french cannot state on the one hand that something is illegal and on the other let it happen. They had to act.

Now maybe the law needs to change, this is an important debate. In the meantime in a law-based country the law needs to be upheld.

Re:Does Uber need executives in France?

[Jesrad]

France has a heavily unionized workforce

Nope. Norway or Italy have heavily unionized workforces, whereas France has the least-unionized workforce (7.7%) in Europe save for Estonia (6.8%).

However, France has some of the richest, most politically influential unions, by a huge margin. To put it simply, unions in France are like parallel political parties, with their own occult sources of funding, high-ranking members inflitrated in every institution, and legal priviledges that protect their position.

But french taxis V.S. Uber is an entirely different, though related, issue.

To make light of the sorry state of Uber in France, you only need to know a few things:
- just a few months ago, Agnès Saal was mediatically ousted from her position as head of the INA for allegedly squandering taxpayers' money on... taxi rides (40 000 euros' worth)
- then a couple weeks ago, we learned that the amount squandered was actually an order of magnitude larger than previously stated - there was simply noway to spend that much on taxis
- also notice that Jean-Jacques Augier, the previous CEO of G7 taxis, the biggest taxi company in France, was the financing director of François Hollande's presidential campaign in 2012
- G7 taxis' current CEO is a close friend of Hollande's Parti Socialiste, and was involved in François Mitterrand's own campaigns too

The intimidation campaign that is raging on against Uber in France is simply how the politicians currently in power are defending some of their illegal sources of funding. The seemingly "out of proportion" violence of this campaign is simply a reminder that, in France, you just don't ask about political parties' or unions' money unless you're ready to die (just like Robert Boulin, Pierre Bérégovoy and judge Pierre Michel died).