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

Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

If taxi drivers have to buy licenses and following certain regulations, shouldn't Uber do the same or are they already?

Re:Not surprised

[Rei]

Uber drivers are subsidized by everybody else. Taxi drivers have to pay high insurance rates because the act of driving a long distance every day for a ton of strangers is a job that inherently leads to a much higher statistical rate of payouts. If they're driving as a taxi on regular car insurance, it's you that's paying the bill for their swindle of the insurance system.

Re:Not surprised

[mysidia]

No... protectionlist laws, like requiring a permit and then limiting the number of outstanding permits to a small fraction of those who want to be in the business, for the sole purpose of restricting supply to be less than what the public needs.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[MoaDweeb]

New Zealand liberalised its taxi system about 25+ years ago. The Gov't allowed anyone to setup a taxi company who had the appropriate car licence endorsement, log books and passed a vetting process for its drivers. etc.

Uber have shown up and decided that they do not have to have vetted drivers, log books etc. 'cos they are Uber!
The Police are investigating.

The barriers for entering the NZ market are quite low but even then Uber do not think they should apply to them.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

>Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.
Shit happens!

>need to compensate who bought the medallions
Nope! My shares went down in the last crash, noone compensated me!

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[Rockoon]

Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.

..and I bought stock in oil reserves with the understanding that I was buying into a limited monopoly. Then Saudi Arabia started dumping oil on the market. Should the government make me whole again, too?

It seems that you are the victim of a common misconception: That the State is the one selling the medallions that cost so much. Wrong, ignorant fuck.

Re:Taxi licenses are crazy expensive

[PopeRatzo]

Medallion owners bought the medallions with the understanding that they were buying into a limited monopoly.

Maybe it should be clarified here that when you see someone claim that it's not the government charging $200,000 for a taxi medallion, that's just the going price on the secondary market. You know, good old capitalism, where people are bidding up the price of a necessarily limited commodity.

The taxi authority looks at population, traffic flow and transportation needs and comes up with a number of taxis that they think should be on the street. Every year, they add new medallions into the system, usually with a lottery. The idea is not so much to protect the cab drivers (cities don't care about cab drivers. If they did, they wouldn't make the minor traffic fines, like your cab being 10 inches over the line of a designated taxi waiting zone, as much as $500 (which practically wipes out the cab driver's week), but to keep the number of taxis from getting so crazy that you have cabs clogging up city centers, fighting for fares.

Another think medallions are used for is to ensure that someone in an underserved part of the city can get a cab. In my city, certain medallions are required for certain times to initiate or terminate a certain percentage of fares in certain parts of the city.

Re:Uber this!

[BlueStrat]

France can always be counted on to do things in the least logical way possible.

In which alternate universe is arresting the people running an illegal business the "least logical way possible"?

The fact that it's illegal for a private person to accept payment for a car ride principally to protect politically-connected businesses practicing an outdated/obsolete business model is both corrupt and illogical. It's protectionist crony-capitalism. Rather than logically correcting such a corrupt system, they doubled down on it. Just because a government declares something "illegal" does not mean it is morally and/or ethically wrong, or a detriment to society and/or the economy.

Strat